Leftover Angels
by Empatheia
Summary: Kanda x Alma, Allen, 14th x Hevlaska, ensemble cast. Allen's "death" during the fight with Alma sets off a chain of unexpected and deeply strange consequences which bring up questions about the nature of God himself.
1. Innocence

**A/N:** This is my submission to the most recent round of the -man bigbang challenge on LiveJournal. I would suggest going to read it there, as it has accompanying art which FFNet can't display. The fantabulous JoJo-kun, one of my artists, was kind enough to check it over for consistency. Any and all awfulness (and there is some) is my fault alone.

This story diverges from canon around 199 and plays silly buggers with the dozen or so chapters preceding that. Be warned: contains blasphemous alternate reality partially inspired by Kaori Yuki.

Disclaimer: I don't own -man and make no profit from my fanworks.

Enjoy!

x.x.x

_01. Innocence_

x.x.x

The Ark expanded to catch Kanda and the disintegrating ghost in his arms with its strange gravity, welcoming them into its white city.

The silence bore down on them immediately, making their ears ache as if they were ten stories underwater. Every sound they made was suddenly magnified - every harsh breath Kanda's lungs tore from the air, the scrape of his knees against the flagstones, the delicate splintering of Alma's ruined body. Even worse were the gaps where sounds were absent, suddenly noticeable - wide empty crevices where their heartbeats should have thundered, the cavern which should have echoed with Alma's breath.

"Come on," Kanda said, just in case Alma could still hear him. "We have to find the door. We have to go, otherwise he'll get there before us and think we died on the way."

Alma didn't answer. He made no sound when Kanda lifted his obsidian body, hardly recognizable as himself anymore, and doggedly began to stagger through the tranquil streets. Not a single sound.

Time seemed to stretch out forever. They passed a dozen doorways, two dozen, a hundred. The air was still as attics, or tombs. Beneath their feet the flagstones blurred through dizzy marching patterns. Kanda began to feel as if they had been there for years, the two of them, wandering the empty Ark in the light of the eternal false twilight.

The right door was not labeled, but Kanda knew it when he saw it, recognized its tall, blocky arch and the shudder of echoing loneliness he felt when he looked at it.

"Almost there," he said.

Alma made no answer. A shard of his forearm broke loose and shattered on the ground, the sound monstrously loud in the artificial hush of the white city.

The door opened to Kanda's shoulder. They stumbled through into darkness. The sound of Kanda's footsteps rose into the air and drifted lazily against ceiling high above, their echoes little more than dull shadows. He could see nothing, but he didn't have to. He knew where he was.

From one ghost city to another.

His crumbling legs folded under him at last, but he carefully angled his fall so that Alma's glass body would land on him rather than the hard marble floor. His leg broke off again at the knee. It hardly hurt at all. He could already feel the awful crawling pull that meant his body was reaching out to heal itself.

Alma lay like a dark statue in the protective circle of his body, cold and motionless and silent. Perhaps he was already gone. Perhaps his soul had lost itself to the devouring rage of the Dark Matter and could not longer be salvaged. Perhaps he was beyond Kanda's reach, beyond anyone's reach, beyond even God's. Perhaps it was just too late.

He considered, then, just curling himself around the shell of the person he had devoted both of his lives to, the person he had loved enough to remember even through death, that beautiful person he had loved despite himself, and waiting for dust and dreamless sleep to claim them both. For one moment, he closed his eyes and faced the idea that the thing in his arms might not be Alma anymore.

Then Alma spoke. Only a few words, and then he fell silent again, but they were enough. Kanda watched his soul - their soul - their souls - walk away into the light, and wondered why his heart was beating wild and terrified in his chest. Grief he could have understood. Why fear? Why couldn't he shake the feeling that something, something was terribly wrong? Why didn't it feel over?

He carefully propped Alma's body against the wall in a corner, in the deepest shadows. "I have to go back," he said. "You'll be safe here. Just wait. Wait for me. I'll come back for you, I promise." Only the second promise he had ever made. He could only hope this one would be easier to keep.

Alma was invisible in the gloom of the corner, black within black, and silent as stone.

The Ark took him back. This trip was easier - he knew the path now, and knew what he wanted. He would return to the battlefield, tear out the throat of every Noah he could reach, and make the Earl tell him how to save Alma. There had to be a way. It was the Earl. He was the kind of person who always left themselves back alleys, trapdoors, escape routes just in case things went sideways. He had to have a way to recall souls. Kanda would learn it and bring Alma back and then nothing would ever hurt him again.

The sky over the city was dim with the threat of rain.

x.x.x

The room seemed to hold its breath.

Shadows and light battled their way across Allen Walker's skin, the war gone underground and quiet. He was aware of his audience, dimly; a ring of desperate half-broken marionettes, their puppeteer and his family, a grinning clown, four unholy angels and a dying demon.

The Fourteenth Noah had his hands around the throat of Allen's soul and was tightening his fingers slowly, patiently, a calm and cheerful smile steady on his face. "You are not dying," he said. "I will have need of your soul in the days to come. But I cannot have you blundering around trying to protect all the wrong things. Therefore, I am putting you to sleep, much as I have slept within you all these years."

Even though Allen knew they were not real fingers, and it was not his real throat, the feeling of suffocation was real enough to be unbearable. He reached out with shaky fingers for the dark figure his blurring eyes could only barely see, but his arms were constrained by the heavy chains he wore, and when he pressed the issue the Fourteenth simply let go with one hand and used it to pin both of Allen's hands to his chest.

"Perhaps if you hadn't just been stabbed you might have had a chance," the Fourteenth said, "but as it is, you are dying. Your only chance is to let me take over. I can heal you. I can save you. Or would you rather die?"

Allen glared up at him, answering with his eyes as clearly as he could: yes, he would. He had said so in so many words not too long ago: "I am Allen Walker, an Exorcist, and I'll die before becoming anything else." And there was something about this, the setup, something wrong. What was it? It was hard to tell the difference between reality and dream, and in dreams things which are strange often feel normal, or at least not worthy of remark. There were many strange things here, but only one of them was important. What was it? What was it? Ah, there - it was taking too long. If this were real he would have been unconscious or dead minutes ago. What had the Noah said? _Let _him take over? But that would imply that he couldn't take over solely by force of will. He needed to Allen to surrender, even just a little.

Which was something he would never, ever do.

Though the feeling of suffocation did not ease in the slightest, Allen suddenly realized that it was not having any effect beyond being unpleasant. He was still alert, his heart was pounding but not struggling, there were no dark spots or flashes of light in his eyes. His lungs could not breathe, but they were not real, and neither was his pounding heart or rest of his panicking body. This was a battle of wills. Allen was good at those. There was a still a chance that he could win this battle and die with his mind still his own.

He smiled.

The bright star in the sky above them wavered and dimmed.

The Noah watched in helpless horror as Allen calmly stood up, breaking the chains and pulling the hands away from his throat. "I would rather die," he said honestly, "but if you'll be more polite I'll at least listen to what you have to say."

"Fool," Neah hissed. "There is no time."

"Wrong," said Allen. His voice rang with absolute faith. "We have time. Look."

The floor rippled and was suddenly clear as glass. Below them gaped a vast red cavern. The walls to their left and right had gaping holes smashed in them, rubble tumbling away into the depths. White strands of something much like spidersilk were stretched across the holes, and as they watched a hundred more spanned the gaps, weaving pale and faintly luminescent nets over them and stopping the slow crumble of its edges.

"What - oh, I see. It seems you are still blessed by Azazel's favour. The Innocence he has assigned to you will keep you alive as long as you are useful to him."

Allen frowned. "Who?"

Neah regarded him with an expression of deep contempt. It looked strange on his delicate, gentle face. With every passing moment, his resemblance to Tyki faded. He had none of Tyki's genial humour, none of the great sadness which ran deep and strong under Tyki's skin. When Allen looked at him, he saw someone who was half-mad with rage and hunger, someone whose black eyes could see nothing but his goals and eventual imagined victory. He was small and cruel and hotly passionate and really, nothing like Tyki at all.

"I forget sometimes how little you know," he said. "You still believe him to be your God, the true God, the Creator. Admittedly, he has done nothing to enlighten you, but anyone who has ever heard the true voice of God would know Azazel for the impostor he is. You have followed and obeyed and loved nothing more than an ambitious underling all this time, and you've had no idea. You are all blind."

"I... haven't the faintest idea what you're talking about," Allen admitted. "How about you explain later, and tell me what it is you want now? Answer carefully."

The dark little madman glared at him. "I do not take orders from mortal vessels," he snapped.

Allen shrugged and raised a hand. "I guess you'll just have to go find someone else, then," he said, and began to apply pressure.

A vast circular glass door appeared in the midst of the thicket, bottom edge partially sunken into the ground, and irised open silently onto a world of chaotic whiteness. A roar of wind and crumbling stone and voices came blowing through it. The Noah's heels slid back a few inches through the dirt.

His eyes widened in panic. "No! No, you fool! You are the only one strong enough - you mustn't! I have waited years to save her!"

"Her...?" Allen paused. There were perhaps a dozen feet between Neah's back and the howling white gate.

Beneath the whirling storm of rage that seemed to make up the Noah, Allen caught a glimpse of the white skeleton of desperation holding him together. There was love there, he saw. Here at last was something Allen could recognize and feel empathy with. He knew what it was like to drive himself past the limits of mortal endurance for the desperate hope of saving his friends. He knew what the need to protect someone felt like, how it burned and twisted inside a person until any pain in one's body became insignificant beside it.

"Tell me," he said.

Hope flashed anew in Neah's eyes. He steadied himself on his feet and began to tell his story.

Allen listened, and learned, and at the end wished very hard that he had exorcised the Noah when he had the chance so he would not have to know this, make this choice.

He tried to convince himself that no matter what he chose, he would find a way to save his friends. It almost worked. Almost.

Time would not go back. He knew what he knew, and the choice had to be made.

Allen took a deep breath and made it.

**X.x.x.x.X**


	2. Wake

x.x.x

_02. Wake_

x.x.x

Kanda emerged into a hushed landscape of death and ruin. Order members moved here and there, slow and clumsy with broken limbs and torn flesh and pain, helping each other to crawl to the Ark and safety.

There was no sign of the Earl, or the Noah, or the Level Four Akuma.

Or Allen.

During the long walk back through the Ark, he had felt almost restful. His path was clear, the only thing left to do was walk on it. Simple. Clear. Easy. But now his stomach twisted in on itself in unwelcome but familiar confusion, knotting itself up painfully and bringing him back into the harsh light of day from the calm place he had found for those few short minutes.

The Earl had left without slaughtering them. That was good, probably. But where was Allen? He recalled the warped smile he had seen on Allen's face after being wounded with Mugen, the dark shadows crawling across his skin, and suddenly wanted to double over and vomit. He knew what was wrong, where his comrade had gone and why, and it was all his fault. He inhaled carefully three times and steeled himself, flattened his face out to the expressionless monotone of a soldier, and took stock of the situation.

Like a tall, menacing sheepdog, Rouvelier was rounding up the survivors and gathering them beside the Ark with impressive speed. Almost everyone had to lean on somebody else just to walk. A great number had to be carried, one at a time, sobbing in agony as their splintered bones and torn flesh jostled each other. The Epstein woman was alive, as was Bak Chan. Old man Zhu had exhausted himself healing the traitor's leg and could not be woken, but his heart still beat. A good dozen others were irreversibly dead.

Lying half-submerged in one of the rubble-filled pools, he spotted Mugen's battered hilt. It looked even worse in his hand, held up to the light - corrugated chunks were missing from the edge, and the entire blade was warped slightly to the left. It was a mess, but it would have to hold up. He wasn't finished yet.

"Kanda Yuu," Rouvelier snapped. "Are you fit for battle?"

Numbly, he assessed himself: seven broken ribs; broken clavicle; four internal organs on the left side lacerated beyond recognition and only halfway done knitting themselves back together; innumerable cuts and bruises; a loud, disorienting ring in his right ear. His face still felt a bit melted, too. His leg was at least firmly reattached and his innards had been in much worse shape half an hour ago. "No, sir," he replied honestly. "My functionality is at twenty percent of normal at best. I will need time to regenerate. About an hour."

Rouvelier's eyebrows drew together. "Unacceptable. We must pursue the Noah clan with all haste, and you are the only Exorcist here. We need you."

Kanda shrugged. "You should have had them build my body better, then. This is as fast as it goes."

Rouvelier stalked over to him and backhanded him viciously across the face. "If you hadn't lost control of yourself, you wouldn't be in this condition. It's shameful. We expect better from Exorcists. I certainly expected better from you, after your years of impressive service. Especially-"

For a moment, Kanda wondered why Rouvelier had gone silent. Then he realized that it was because he had raised Mugen's point and pressed it to the inspector's thick throat, one deep breath away from drawing blood. "If you want to give orders," he said wearily, "do it. Don't waste your time or mine lecturing me."

Rouvelier swallowed, hard, unable to stop himself. Mugen met his saggy skin and sank in an eighth of an inch, leaving a little red slit. A bead of blood slipped out and coursed down behind the inspector's dirty starched collar. Having made his point, Kanda withdrew his blade and considered standing up.

As if nothing had happened, Rouvelier cleared his throat and turned to the rest of the group. "We have insufficient firepower to pursue the Noah clan at this time. We will retreat to Headquarters and recover while we attempt to track their course and intended destination. We will also use that time to gather all Exorcists in from the field and debrief them on today's events. We will remain on high alert unless further information comes to light. Those of you who can walk, assist with the transportation of the dead. Though the Earl appears to have retreated for today, that does not mean he will not return before we are ready for him. We must maintain our usual precautions. Wenhamm."

"Present, sir," Reever croaked. He was half-carrying Johnny, who couldn't seem to lift his head.

"I'll leave debriefing Komui to you. Miss Epstein?"

"Unconscious, sir," said the scientist kneeling at her side. "Looks like something gave her a good ding round the noggin."

"Chan?"

"Incapacitated, sorry to say," Bak groaned ruefully from somewhere across the little knot of people.

Kanda remembered his legs, the way they had been bent in all the wrong places, the jagged protuberances of glistening bone, his wide-eyed green pallor as he struggled to stay conscious. There was not enough pain in his voice now to reflect that. Kanda wondered how and where he had learned to suppress pain like that, or if he had drugged himself out of it already. Maybe he was just dying and hadn't realized it yet, or he _had_ realized and figured there was no point making a groany fuss about it. Kanda could respect that.

"Understood. All right, be on your guard. Double file through the Ark. Whoever is fittest, run ahead and alert the medical staff on arrival."

Obediently, the ragtag bundle of broken people shuffled into the Ark and vanished. Kanda still had not stood up. The pool beside him - where Alma had slept through nine years, torn up and kept from healing - was full of splintered concrete boulders that had once been part of the ceiling. The reflection of the thin grey sky glimmered in its clear waters like mercury. Had Alma dreamed? Had he felt anything? When they cut him open and stirred eggshells into his guts, had he felt it? Had he known what they were making him into, as if he hadn't already done more than enough, gone so far above and beyond-

Enough, he thought. Enough. There was nothing more he could do for Alma until he found the Noah clan and made them talk. Dwelling on Alma's past would do him no good in the present.

"Exorcist! March!" Rouvelier snapped.

The sterile white city inside the Ark had until today been oddly comforting to him. He had come here several times without reason in the past few weeks, just to listen to the quiet and catch his breath. Today, it gave him no solace at all. The white streets were stained with the blood of the Order, bits of Alma's black glassy flesh crunched underfoot, and he could almost smell the Noah in the air. He walked straight through without hesitation, catching up to Rouvelier just in time to walk through the door to Headquarters with him.

The sound hit them like a physical blow. The place was in an uproar. Medics and those healthy enough to run bolted sloppily through the halls with their arms full of bandages and bottles, avoiding each other mostly by sheer luck. There was something strange, though. There were too many of them, too much haste, for the paltry two dozen wounded they had brought back. Headquarters had a medical staff equipped and prepared to deal with nearly a hundred casualties at once without breaking a sweat, but here they were, milling about like panicked sheep.

"What is going on here?" Rouvelier snapped, grabbing the arm of a harried young man with dark hair and yanking him out of the flow. "Explain."

"Attack," panted the orderly, "one hundred and twenty-four staff wounded, fifteen dead, hospital wing collapsed. Have to go, sorry-" And he was gone, tearing down the hallway on staggering feet.

Rouvelier stared after him. "Attack...?" he echoed. "Here? They dared?" He sounded almost surprised, as if he had expected the enemy to wait for them to properly regroup and put up a fight. The Earl had spoiled them. He had sprung surprise attacks on them, of course, but had generally retreated for a while after each one, as if acting in the spirit of fair play. The Fourteenth, it seemed, had no such sense of sportsmanship.

Snagging another orderly, Kanda leaned in close enough to hear without shouting. "What was their objective?" he asked, though he was afraid he already knew. Confirmation was needed before any action could be decided on.

The orderly stared at him like he was an idiot. "Basement," he said, "see for yourself."

Rouvelier didn't need to be told twice. He strode at a near-run, plowing a path through the busy hallways like a train. Kanda followed close behind him, in the empty pocket created by his sweeping presence. The elevators, mercifully, still worked. They plummeted down into the heart of the London base like dropped stones, slowing only when they reached the subterranean cavern they had reinstalled Hevlaska in after the move.

Hevlaska was not there. Her great stone platform sat empty, and her massive iron shackles lay in heavy coils on the floor.

Rouvelier ground his teeth and clenched his fists, face reddening, rage building through every line of his body, but something was strange, something was off, they were missing something-

Kanda squinted, then ran out of the elevator and hoisted himself up onto the platform. His eyes hadn't lied. The platform was not empty after all. "Inspector, I think you had better come see this," he said.

After helping Rouvelier up onto the platform, they stood together and stared at what sat at the center of the great stone circle: an enormous white sword with a steel cross emblazoned across its breadth, driven into the rock with inhuman strength. Allen's sword. The Order's pale Excalibur. He couldn't use it anymore, Kanda realized. The Fourteenth was a Noah. The sword was Innocent, forged to destroy his kind. It would not turn on its maker's soldiers. Remembering what Allen had told him of Suman Dark's fate, Kanda couldn't blame the Noah for abandoning it before it turned on _him_.

The sword, remarkable as it was, was easily explained. The white, glassy cubes piled in five neat stacks around it were not.

"I don't understand," Rouvelier whispered.

Neither did Kanda. Nearly two dozen cubes of Innocence, priceless weapons in the war against the Noah, left lying on the floor like children's playing blocks. Why take the guardian, but not the guarded treasure? What use was Hevlaska to the Noah if they were no longer interested in the Innocence? It would only have taken them moments to destroy them all, reduce them to useless dust. It didn't make any sense. Nothing made sense anymore. Kanda stared, and stared, but no answers were immediately obvious.

"Perhaps they believe they would reconstitute themselves, as Walker's did, and Lenalee Lee's," Rouvelier postulated uncertainly.

Kanda shook his head. "No. If they thought that, they'd have taken it with them. Maybe they thought it would self-activate and attack them?"

Now it was Rouvelier's turn to shake his head. "They would only need to continue destroying it. It could not attack them while it reconstituted itself. At least one of them is versed in various magicks, as well. I am certain they could find a way to hold it dormant, given time and safety. It would have been a heavy blow to us. We no longer have the luxury of searching for lost Innocence. We must make do with what we have, and we could not make more Exorcists if we were to lose the Innocence yet umatched with a user."

Doing a quick mental count, Kanda came up horrifyingly short: only twelve Exorcists remained active. Of those, two were untrained, one had no offensive capabilities, one was too gravely injured to fight, and most of the rest were exhausted. The Finder ranks had been severely depleted in the hunt for the Generals, and were not very useful in combat situations anyway.

Eight. Eight Exorcists to fight twelve well-rested, well-organized Noahs and their army of Akuma. Even if the Earl was too busy to make more - which Kanda severely doubted, the man seemed capable of being in more than one place at a time - Japan was probably still full of them, and the Noahs had brought at least four Level Fours to the fight in America, none of which had died. He had been too busy killing Alma and Allen to bother with the real threat. His throat clenched with bitter self-hatred, but he had no time for it. Not yet.

A strange thought occurred to Kanda. "Maybe they're poisoned somehow."

Rouvelier turned his narrow black eyes on Kanda. "Poisoned?"

Uncomfortable with the entire line of thought, Kanda shrugged. "Like you said, some of them are magicians. They could have... tainted them, or laid traps, or something. Or maybe they're fakes."

"I will have the area quarantined until the science division has a chance to investigate," Rouvelier said decisively after a moment's cold pause. "We cannot afford to trust in gifts from the hands of demons. There is no hurry - we have not found any compatibles to use these, so they are effectively useless at the moment in any case."

Rouvelier liked to state the obvious when he was unsettled, Kanda noted. He had always seemed a taciturn man, not given to words unless he had something to say, but for the last half hour he had spoken almost constantly, like the sound of his own voice drowned out the terrors in his head.

Cutting a neat salute, Kanda turned to leave.

"Where are you going, Exorcist?"

"To pursue the Earl of Millennium and his company," he said flatly.

The inspector evaluated him with a cold look. "Are you fit?" he asked at last.

Kanda shrugged. "Fit enough."

Struggle flickered on Rouvelier's face. It was clear to Kanda that he wanted nothing more than to give the go-ahead, but there was something holding him back. Perhaps the Head Generals had other plans for him. "No," he said at last, though it obviously pained him to do so. "You will wait one night. We will regroup the remaining Exorcists, attempt to repair your weapon, and deploy you as a group tomorrow morning."

Kanda gritted his teeth. "Their trail will be cold by then."

"Commendable as your enthusiasm is, I am forced to admit that sending you alone while you are damaged would be tantamount to throwing your valuable life away. There are too few of you left. If we are to win, we must be more conservative with our remaining resources. Also-" and here the inspector paused to visibly calm himself- "I do not think we will find the Earl unless and until he wishes to be found." The words seemed to leave a sour taste in his mouth. His lips twisted around it.

"I understand," Kanda answered stiffly. "In that case, I am going to bed. I will heal more quickly if I rest."

Rouvelier nodded back, his face slowly reddening with the effort of standing by his decision.

The elevator door clicked shut between them, leaving Kanda alone with his thoughts.

Rouvelier was not an evil man, Kanda decided. Cruel, ruthless, entirely lacking in empathy, yes, but there was little actual malevolence in him. He used people like chess pieces, moved them about in little ordered plastic regiments in his mind, and paid no heed to the price in flesh because their hearts and souls were not important to victory. The war was his life, his passion, the winning of it his only dreaming wish. He would watch cities burn without remorse for a chance at taking down even one of the enemy for good.

Kanda almost liked him. He was honest, he never bothered with blame, and he never hesitated. Predictable. Easy to follow. But there was the matter of the Third Exorcists. Kanda did not make a habit of empathy for others, or for himself, but after what he had watched Alma suffer through, and suffered himself, and everything they had inflicted on each other... watching the Third in the room with them bloat and warp and scream, unable to fight off the assault from within, had made him a little sick. At least they had been volunteers, unlike he and Alma. That made it a little better. They had come to the battlefield willingly, ready to die.

They should not have been made. Hopefully this failure would ensure no one ever tried anything like them again. But at least they had been willing.

Alma's faces flashed across the corner of his left eye, their identical smiles curving away into the mist. How had he not seen it? Looking back, knowing the truth, it seemed obvious. Their irrepressible optimism in the heart of darkness, their playful humour and pranks, the core of shining strength which lay at the root of their soul, the way their smile made Kanda yearn for something, something he couldn't put a name to, something warm and close and wonderful - putting Alma into the young artificial body they had made for her had changed nothing of her. Alma as he was now was broken, but the pieces were all still recognizable.

Whatever kind of person Kanda had been in his first life, he was quite sure of one thing now - he had not come willing. There had been a life for him, one he had made for himself, with rainwashed gardens and blue skies and a woman with red, red lips who loved him, a life with a long, gentle future. They had torn him from it, brought him to their forges, beat him and quenched him until he became a hard blade and his flattened heart forgot how to bleed. They had taken an ordinary man with an ordinary life and made him a soldier, and when he died they had brought him back and made him a soldier again, this time taking out his heart entirely and replacing it with a reeking black lotus blossom.

And they had done the same to that man's lover. Those people were gone now, he knew, leaving whatever Kanda and Alma were now in their place. Perhaps if they had been left alone they could have lived four, five years in peace and joy before the end of the world. That it had taken this long was in part thanks to what the scientists had done to them, Kanda admitted, so they probably would not have gotten the full nine years. But they would have had some time. Maybe enough. Maybe...

He was fooling himself, he realized then. No amount of time would ever have been enough.

Cold metal touched and soothed his feverishly healing skin. Kanda realized he had slumped against the wall of the elevator and was shaking, barely managing to keep on his feet.

Two minutes later, the door clicked open and deposited him in the residential wing. His room here still smelled wrong, and the ceiling fan clicked and kept him awake many nights, but tonight he was too tired to be homesick for the tower by the sea.

Shucking his stiff, torn clothes, he briefly considered going straight to bed and sleeping with Alma's blood still crusted in his hair. Shuddering, he thought better of it and pulled a towel out of his bare closet. It would only take ten minutes, and would maybe save him a nightmare or two. This time of night, the showers would even probably be empty. It would be quiet and warm and peaceful and he wouldn't have to talk to anybody-

They weren't empty. Through the dim light and the steam, Kanda picked out a shock of red hair against the black tiles. He sighed. There was little chance Lavi would ignore him. Not with Allen... gone.

"Yuu?"

Sometimes, Kanda hated how often he was right. Hoping Lavi would get the hint, he stayed coldly silent and stepped under the furthest tap, cranking it up to maximum heat. The water started out cold, as always. He shuddered slightly under the icy rain, but it felt good. Numbing. Then the heat came, and scalded away whatever wouldn't freeze.

"Yuu," Lavi said again. "I heard what happened today at the North American Branch."

Grinding his teeth a little, Kanda kept his mouth shut and scrubbed himself as fast as he could manage. The hair was a problem. It would take ages to get all the muck out of it, but the thought of staying here was almost as awful as the thought of going to bed with a mop of hair full of battle detritus. He couldn't help taking work home with him, but he tried to keep it away from his sleep when he could.

"I'm sorry about Alma."

_None of your business!_ Kanda almost yelled, stopping himself at the last moment.

Lavi was just trying to be supportive, a good friend... something _anyone else_ in the building could have used more than Kanda in that moment. He didn't want to make an enemy of Lavi. He was good in a fight, could be trusted to have Kanda's back. But Kanda didn't want to be friends with him. The last time he'd stopped guarding and let someone else get near him, they'd gone mad and tried to kill him and ended up buried in a grave of shadows under unfamiliar city streets and it just wasn't something he did anymore. For good reason.

He was glad he'd managed to keep Allen at some kind of distance. Not far, not nearly as far as he should have, but just far enough to keep him from falling apart like a house of straw when what had happened with Allen today had... happened. So close. It had been so close. He had felt himself caving in the weeks and months before today, thawing a little, letting a little warmth creep into that stupid nickname. He had almost ruined himself all over again.

Then Lavi had to go and say "And as for Allen... we'll get him back. You know we will. He might even come back on his own, knowing him."

Knowing Allen, he was right. It wouldn't surprise him in the least if Allen walked right back through the Ark two days hence, alone in his body and completely intact, leaving a trail of Noah bodies behind him. Knowing Allen, he would smile like an idiot and apologize for causing trouble. Knowing Allen, he wouldn't hold the grudge he really ought to hold. Kanda had no idea how we would face him, if it came to that. At least Alma had come at him with a sword. Kanda understood swords. Allen wouldn't. Kanda would have to find a way to navigate their relationship that didn't involve killing him again, and he wasn't sure where he'd even begin. Normal people would probably start with an apology, he thought, but he didn't know any.

Lavi paused for a moment, clearly listening for tears. That would have been ridiculous if Kanda hadn't been too damn tired to tell if he was crying or not. Probably not. His tear ducts had probably atrophied years ago from disuse, but still, he didn't want Lavi to look at his face and read anything meaningful there.

"Fuck off," he said wearily, without bite. Just enough of a warning sign for anyone with half a brain to read.

Lavi had a brain so powerful it was sometimes considered a national treasure, full of exactingly perfect memories in a hundred subjects, more knowledge than any person could reasonably use in a lifetime. That wasn't what Bookmen were for, of course - they were meant to store knowledge, find it and save it to their vast internal banks, not use it. But one would think that all that book learning would have afforded Lavi at least a few social graces. Not so. He blundered over like a naked grasping vine, limbs reaching out to curl around Kanda and imprison him in a damp prison of sympathy.

Kanda recoiled in horror and put out one hand to push him away. Lavi stopped, raising his hands in the universal sign of surrender. "I'm not going to hug you, Yuu," he said patiently.

"Then what are you doing?" Kanda growled.

Lavi shrugged. "You have a big snag in your hair. Back of your head. Figured I'd help you untangle it, since you can't see it." Without asking further permission, he reached up and set to work, humming a little under his breath as he carefully drew each strand out from the tangle and laid it straight against Kanda's back. His fingers were gentle and respectfully unobtrusive.

Though his throat closed painfully and his eyes burned and he began to develop a headache, Kanda did not cry. He acknowledged, briefly, that he wanted to. Here, alone in the dark with a silent companion who wasn't asking him to talk, wasn't asking him for anything at all, only offering, he could feel the cold steel shell he'd clamped down around the entire afternoon begin to thin and crack; but that didn't mean he had to give in. It was still his choice, and he chose against tears. Over and over again, he chose and chose, and over and over again the choice came back to ask again.

"There you go," Lavi said at last, smoothing a hand down his now-polished slick of hair before thumping him gently on the shoulder. "Wash your back?"

"No, thank you," Kanda replied stiffly, stomping out of the shower and retrieving his towel with unnecessary force.

He saw Lavi wave out of the corner of his eye as he headed for the door, and heard a quiet "Good night, Yuu," drift out after him just before it shut behind him.

His room welcomed him, with its austere stone floor and white plaster walls and clacky fan. He let it close around him with great relief, sinking down into his sheets and turning his face into his pillow to shut out the sliver of light creeping in from the hallway under the door.

He felt like hell, and tomorrow would probably be worse. The least he could hope for was dreamless sleep, but he probably wouldn't get it.

He always hoped.

He always dreamed.

**X.x.x.x.X**


	3. Covenant

x.x.x

_03. Covenant_

x.x.x

It was one of the strangest things he had ever experienced, Allen decided. Maybe _the_ strangest thing.

His body moved without him, with a kind of confident grace he was fairly sure he didn't possess on his own. He couldn't move his eyes, so he couldn't see his legs move, and since he couldn't feel them either it was like he was floating across the ground like a windblown leaf. There was no pain. He was not shackled, not this time. He was a voluntary passenger in his own body while someone else drove it like a carriage.

It was unsettling. He didn't like it very much. There was comfort, however, in the knowledge that if anything went badly, he could take the reins back at a moment's notice.

Patience, he reminded himself. Watch, listen, and learn. There would be time to go back and find Kanda and Alma in the underground hall when this was done, if they were still there.

The path the Noah clan took through the Ark was winding and slow, but Allen noticed through careful observation that they were only making a big loop, coming back to a point very close to where they'd entered. He wasn't sure what the purpose behind that was - to throw pursuers off the trail? The Order was crippled, there was no way they could be following already. They couldn't be doing it for Allen's benefit, they didn't know he was there. They were probably just being careful, he decided at last. Just in case Kanda came after them all by himself. That wouldn't surprise him at all - he had seen what Alma looked like when they went through the gate. He would be looking for information, or failing that, vengeance. Maybe doubling back was a good idea after all.

There was little to do but think and listen, so Allen opened his mind and tapped into the input from his ears. It was odd, like putting on a pair of headphones, but it worked well enough.

"-don't understand, I would have helped you," the Earl was saying, sounding befuddled.

Neah shrugged their shoulders. "Maybe you would have. But after Azazel died, you would have wanted to take his place, and I couldn't have that. She has as many reasons to hate you as she does Azazel. You are perhaps the lesser of two evils, but you are murdering and using the blood of her children to fight your battles."

"They're not her children," the Earl protested.

His voice sounded odd to Allen's secondhand hearing. The grating carnival edge to it had faded, leaving behind what sounded like a very tired mild-mannered man just past the prime of his life. Neah was looking straight ahead, however, and the Earl was walking beside them, so he couldn't see.

Again, Neah shrugged. "She loves them as if they are. Can you blame her, after what you did with your great Flood?"

"Her Flood!"

"You pushed her into that. She always regretted it, you know that. She did it to spare their souls the fate you had planned for them. And now you've made them again, to use them the same way. You're repeating history. I wanted to break that cycle, give her a world where her children could live peacefully without gods or angels using them as proxies for their petty war."

"You want to make her Steward?" the Earl said, sounding surprised. "How? The One left Azazel in control. He cannot be killed, only frustrated. You know that."

At last, Neah flicked their eyes left to meet the Earl's.

Allen was surprised. He was much as his voice had made him sound - a thin, tall man in his fifties, with sunken grey eyes and fragile dark skin. The telltale line of black scars marched elegantly across his forehead under his tophat. His suit was dignified and dark. This? This was the Order's enemy, the nemesis of humanity, the evil soul who had masterminded so many of the tragedies history recorded? He looked like an aging banker. And the look in his eyes... Allen knew that look. He'd seen it so many times in the eyes of his friends, and knew he had used it many times himself: sorrow, and love. Whatever else he was, it was true that he loved Neah.

And somewhere inside Neah, he found to his surprise, that love was answered. Not loudly, not enough to stop him from remaking the world for the person he loved most, but it was there.

"I have a plan," Neah said quietly. "Will you listen? I have promised not to kill you, and I will hold to that, but I will do anything and everything necessary to achieve my goal. I may not be able to kill you myself, but I will find a way if you will not help me."

"Now, now, brother, threats are hardly necessary. I will listen. Tell me your plan, and we will see."

Hiding behind his own eyes, Allen listened wonderingly. He knew enough now to understand their conversation, but there were still so many pieces missing. And there was the matter of the woman in Tyki's arms. If Allen hadn't seen it for himself, he might not have believed that there was any connection between her and the Exorcist he'd known.

She was very small, and had a delicate pointed face. Enormous black hollows shadowed her eyes. He did not know what colour they were, as she had never opened them. Her skin was darker than a Noah's, and her long curling hair seemed to swallow whatever light dared to touch it. She was beautiful, he supposed, but not in a very human way. There was something dark and vast and alien inside her. He had felt it before, a long time ago, when she had enveloped him and looked through his soul, but then he had been too lost and shocked to make much note of it. It had made sense at the time, because then she had looked vast and alien too. Only her lips were still truly familiar, full and curving across the planes of her face, but they were only human-sized now.

He wondered who had given her the name "Hevlaska." He knew her true name now, and it bore no relation.

Neah outlined his plan for the Earl. At several points, Allen nearly clawed his way back into control just so he could properly express his shock, but managed to restrain himself and hear the rest.

It was insane. Twisted. Almost beautiful, in its own way. Very difficult and risky at almost every step. It made him sick to think of working with the Earl, who had killed or wounded so many of his friends and made so many others weep and grieve for them, who had used the souls of Allen's people to make evil, ruinous weapons for his unholy war. And if he couldn't convince his comrades to join in, he would, as Cross had warned him, very likely have to fight them.

But it might work. And if it did...

Allen paced the diameter of his internal clearing for a while, then sat in the stone throne for a while, his mind racing.

If it worked, a new age of humanity would be born, where they would be allowed to develop as the true God had intended them to. Peace would at last be possible. His friends would live, and would never have to fight again. Humanity would have a chance to be better. The world could be... better.

"I'll fight with you," he said softly, knowing Neah could hear him. "If you can do this, I will fight to the end."

x.x.x

Two hours before dawn, Kanda woke up with the absolute certainty that there was someone in his room. That someone was, if he guessed right, sitting cross-legged on the end of his bed. The door and window were both locked. He hadn't heard any footsteps.

Without opening his eyes, he reassured himself of Mugen's hilt in his hand, took a slow and careful breath, and moved. His sword whined through the air, coming to rest against the intruder's throat before his falling coverlet hit the floor. The intruder didn't flinch or move, only chuckled softly with a terrible, familiar voice.

"Hello, Kanda Yuu," said the Fourteenth Noah, his face illuminated by the moonlight spilling in the window. "Forgive me for intruding so rudely. I believe we've met, but I haven't had the chance to introduce myself."

After the first shocked moment of recognition, Kanda willed himself to move. Cut the bastard's throat, let him bleed out on the stone floor and white sheets, he told himself. One more Noah down. One threat culled from the stampeding herd already trampling them. He stared at the Fourteenth's calm face, his sardonic half-smile, and tried his hardest to murder him in cold blood. The Fourteenth continued speaking until he was done, and Kanda's hand refused to move.

"I'll kill you," Kanda growled, hoping to convince himself.

The Fourteenth shook his head and gingerly moved the blade away from his throat with two fingers. "No, you won't. And besides, I'm not here to harm you or anyone else. If I were, I would be doing that instead of watching you sleep."

That was a bit creepy, Kanda thought, but so was everything else about him. "What do you want?" he asked guardedly. There were other questions he wanted to ask just as much, but he couldn't. They would leave him too obviously vulnerable. He got the impression that it didn't matter, the strange and frightening person sitting on the end of his bed already knew everything he needed to in order to take him apart and leave him ruined. "And I know who you are, don't bother with that introduction."

"Actually," said the Fourteenth, "you know even less about who I am than you do about what I want, so if I were you, I would shut my mouth and listen." His mild tone hadn't wavered a jot, but there was suddenly an undercurrent to it that spoke to Kanda of razors and black water and endless cold.

Kanda shut his mouth and listened, glaring and trying not to notice how the stranger ran his hand through the right side of Allen's hair just like Allen had often done when about to try and explain something he knew no one would believe. He tried to focus on what the stranger was wearing - a white Chinese-style long-sleeved shirt and wide white leggings, no shoes, one sleeve hanging empty - instead, because that was different and non-Allen and made it easier to remember that the person sitting in front of him was not his comrade. Not anymore.

"My oldest name is Samael," the Noah said without further preamble.

"The angel?" Kanda said with a skeptical snort.

The Noah nodded. "Good, it seems you've found time to do some reading between battles. That will shorten my speech considerably. Lately I have been called Neah. If that is easier on your tongue, you may call me that instead." He continued without pausing to wait for confirmation. "I should begin by telling you that your friend is safe, for now."

"For now?"

"I can't guarantee he will remain so," Neah said, "but his chances will improve if you cooperate."

Kanda scowled. He didn't like that. At all. First off, it was manipulative, and though Kanda hated many things, being manipulated was near the top. Secondly, it assumed he cared about Allen's fate enough to be manipulated by threats to his safety, which was presumptuous. Lastly, the angel was right, which was most of what bothered him about it. "Tell me what you want already," he growled grudgingly.

The angel told him.

All Kanda could do was stare. "That's... insane. And impossible. Even if you are an angel, which I don't necessarily believe."

"Will you do it?"

His face hardened. He wanted the Order torn down more than anyone else alive. Probably more even than the Earl did. But the Order existed because of the Earl and his Noah. The idea of working with them was sickening. Even now, despite the face this Noah was wearing, his hands itched to surge forward and strangle the life out of him. He thought about going into battle with the Earl at his side, protecting the Earl's back. The rage that howled out of him surprised even him with its ferocity. "There's no way in hell I'll work with you bastards," he hissed.

The angel closed Allen's eyes and sighed. "Not even to bring down the false god who's brought all this suffering down on you?"

"The Earl is the same damn thing," Kanda retorted. "He uses people to beat up on his little brother just like his little brother uses people to beat up on him. They're the same. The only difference is that the Order doesn't destroy the souls of the people who work for it."

The eyes of the angel suddenly grew sharp and narrow. "Doesn't it?" he asked softly.

Kanda had no answer for that. His soul was little more at this point than a heap of moldy shards rotting his life away. The Order had ruined him. The Earl ruined souls too, but at least he didn't pretend to care about saving them. He at least was honest about his goal. And once that goal was achieved, he would have no more need for humanity. If the angel was telling the truth, they would be free. Permanently.

He still couldn't do it. He had hated the Earl too much and for too long, and for too many good reasons. "I won't do it," he repeated.

"I was afraid you'd say that."

"I knew he would," said a new voice, "which is why I took the trouble of coming here. I really hate this place, you know."

A very familiar voice. A very familiar, completely impossible voice.

"You're dead," Kanda said, very carefully modulating his voice to sound calm. "I saw the blood. The mask."

The man in the window shrugged, his red hair shifting uneasily with the night breeze. "Rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated. Which was basically the point. So, how about it, kid? I may be dead, but I'm still a member of the Order, and I'm pretty sure I still outrank you."

"I won't follow a traitor, either," Kanda said obstinately, but he was shaken. He had had his suspicions when the body vanished, but they had not had much to do with Cross still being alive. More to do with the Order doing experiments on his corpse to try and find and replicate the source of his magic. Like what they did with all dead Exorcists they could retrive. Study, dissect... reanimate.

Cross rolled his eyes. "Kids. I hate 'em."

Something strange was happening to the angel, Kanda realized just then. His face was twisting oddly, his hands jerking wildly through the air as if two puppeteers were fighting for their strings. As he found out in a moment, that was very close to true.

"No," the angel gritted, "don't, he can't know, not yet-"

"Shut up," said the angel then, only it wasn't the angel anymore. The annoyed, breathless look on his swiftly paling skin was all Allen.

Allen was alive. Apparently sharing his body with a murderous, evil bastard, but alive. Kanda hadn't killed him. He had so much to answer for it should hardly have made a dent in the pile, but it did. It mattered so much that Allen wasn't gone.

Kanda stared. "Beansprout?"

Allen winced. "And you were doing so well," he said under his breath, then sighed and smiled and leaned forward to put his arm around Kanda's shocked shoulders, just for a moment, as if to reassure Kanda that he was still alive, or perhaps to reassure himself that Kanda was still alive. "You left Martel. Why? Is Alma all right?"

No. Alma was not all right. Alma was a lifeless statue staring sightlessly into the endless dark and Kanda knew full well that his painful hope was probably deluded. Alma was... Alma was not in any way all right.

Watching him, Allen's face fell. Apparently he had seen everything he needed to know in the sudden black shadows in Kanda's eyes. "Oh, Kanda. I'm so sorry." Then: "Listen, I know you hate the Noah, and you obviously have good reason. For what it's worth, I hate them too, not least for what they've done to you. But Neah and I have a bargain with them, and I have reason to believe they'll keep it. Please. Help us. I don't think you'll regret it."

That was just... unfair. Incredibly, deeply unfair. The angel had been difficult enough to refuse, and Cross even more so. But Allen... Allen had never done anything to hurt him. He had instead risked his life and body time and time again to help Kanda, save him, protect him. Kanda... owed him, for giving him those few last moments with Alma at the very least.

And Allen had promised. Allen always, always kept his promises.

He glared at each of them in turn, fighting with himself, torn between hatred and hope and obligation. Allen said nothing more, only sat quietly with his hand resting in his lap, his eyes earnest and entreating. Cross lit up a long cigar and watched him, his face unreadable.

In the end, it came down to Alma. Always Alma.

"I'll do it," he said finally, "on one condition."

The angel surged back into Allen's face, swamping it in shadows. "If it is possible, we will do our best to grant it."

"Not good enough. Either you give me this, or I'm out."

"...Name it." The angel waited, guarded and calculating.

Kanda took a deep breath. "Bring Alma back," he said. "Make him human again. No Dark Matter, no regeneration power, nothing. Just human, and alive."

The angel looked at him with Allen's eyes, and in them Kanda saw both the angel's sorrow and Allen's. Kanda knew before they spoke what the answer would be. "I am sorry," said Neah, "that is not possible. If I had power over life and death, I would have put it to good use already. But wait! There is something you should know before you refuse."

Wait? It wasn't as if Kanda could go anywhere. They were between him and the door, and there was nothing outside the door but cold hallways and a hundred other things he hated.

"Alma's soul, and the souls of all the other Akuma which were not slain by Innocence... they still exist, though in a terrible state, in what your mythology calls Hell. It is like... like a midden heap, for the detritus of ruined souls. A very unpleasant place. However, the souls relegated there are not entirely beyond saving."

The images the angel's words conjured were like knives between his ribs: Alma's face and arms and half his torso, crawling across a seething floor of screaming heads and disembodied limbs, ears bleeding from the cacophony of horror and pain; Alma's flesh rotting slowly away before his eyes, the brown stench of decay nearly visible in the lurid red light of the false sky; Alma weeping, and his acid tears eating away at his face until only his skull remained, fixed in a rictus grin of hopeless terror.

No. Never.

"How?" Kanda asked hoarsely.

A mad light flamed behind Neah's eyes. "Destroy the being who holds its key."

For a long, long moment, Kanda tried to hold back the flood of rage and desperation. He doubted the angel was lying, and that was the only thing making it possible. Had the angel been waiting to play this card since the beginning? Had he always planned to hold Alma's soul over his head if he refused? The worst thing was that he couldn't. If it was true, if killing Azazel would make it possible to drag Alma's soul out of Hell and back into the light, he would have to do everything in his power. Even if it meant working with the Noah. Even if it meant betraying every other Exorcist left alive. Even if it meant permanent death and facing the long dark alone. "God damn you," he snarled.

Neah smiled. It was not a happy smile. "Oh, believe me: he already has."

**X.x.x.x.X**


	4. Congregation

x.x.x

_04. Congregation_

x.x.x

Over the hours between then and dawn, Cross and Neah shared the remaining details of their mad, precarious plan to kill God.

Then they went around to each Exorcist currently available at Headquarters and asked for their help, and Allen began to understand what Cross had meant by telling him he would have to hurt people he cared about if he became the Fourteenth Noah.

"No," said the Bookman flatly, then looked down at Lavi's sleeping face. "Not him, either. The Bookmen cannot be involved in this. Will not. Whether you succeed or fail, you will tip the balances of the war, and that is something we must avoid at all costs."

Lavi, apparently not asleep after all, sat up and glared with his one burning green eye. "I should be allowed to choose for myself. I want to help them."

"No," said the Bookman. "You are young. You are passionate when you should be calm. Think: if they fail, what then? If every Exorcist fails alongside them, the war is lost. The Earl will win without contest."

That was something Allen hadn't thought of. Neah had, but he had hoped to avoid the point. His chances of success rose with every Exorcist he could convince, after all. To have all of them would afford him the best chance of all, but as the Bookman said, it would leave the world entirely defenseless in the event of their failure.

"Allen is already lost. Kanda Yuu should stay, but I realize that there exists no one here capable of stopping him, so it cannot be helped. But Lavi, you must stay. Now get out of here, Noah, before I raise the alarm."

They left without argument, leaving Lavi to fight his own battle.

That was two of twelve already out of the picture. Neah did not plan to ask Timothy, as his weapon was as of yet unrefined, and he was still untutored. The same for Chaoji Han. In a battle, he would be more of a hindrance than an aid. Noise Marie was still injured. That left the three remaining generals, Lenalee, Miranda, and Krory. Only six potential allies. The number seemed terribly small.

"Fuck, no," Winters replied instantly.

"What? Why not?" Both Neah and Allen were taken aback. Allen had, from what little experience of Winters he had, expected him to be at least intrigued by the idea of fighting an actual god.

Winters glowered, clearly considering killing them where they stood. It wouldn't be all that difficult, considering how Allen had only one arm and no weapon to fight back with. Neah had power, of course, but it was ill-suited to outright combat. Allen began counting escape routes. "Not gonna lie, going up against the big guy himself would be interesting, but... it's what you say'll happen after that. World peace and whatnot. All the Akuma gone, no more wars. Sounds like a total fucking bore."

They stared. Allen had underestimated his bloodthirst severely. They left without another word.

Klaud Nyne and Froi Tiedoll were nowhere to be found, so they moved on to Krory.

"Without question, I would like to help," he said after listening with a grave and attentive ear, "but I am not sure what assistance I could offer. My weapon is very specialized. Even if you could alter it, as you say, does God - excuse me, Azazel - even have blood for me to drink?"

"Even if you could not inflict as much direct damage on him as Kanda Yuu could, there remains the fact that you are effectively invincible so long as we can keep your Innocence aligned with your soul and unsubjected to Azazel's command, which Cross and I are fairly confident we can do. If members of our force are wounded beyond being able to fight, we may need someone invulnerable to carry them away to safety," Neah pointed out.

Krory frowned and sank his chin into his hands. He looked a bit silly, a great hulking vampire sitting on the edge of his tiny white bed in his underpants, staring pensively through his long fingers. Allen, having seen him in combat, knew that no matter how amusing he was when outside of it, he was nothing to be laughed at.

"Lavi is not coming?" he repeated after a while. He had already asked that two or three times, but it seemed to be a sticking point for him. His loyalties within the Order seemed to lie primarily with Lavi and Allen, who had rescued him from his lonely castle life and his twisted, mutually destructive love. Therefore, he was torn between following one and staying with the other. "I... am afraid that if this does not work, I will be leaving him to fight the rest of the war alone."

"You are invulnerable," Neah reminded him impatiently. "Even if we fail, you will live."

Krory, who was really much cleverer than he seemed, frowned and lifted his head out of his hands. "I am invulnerable so long as my Innocence is shielded," he corrected. "If you fail and General Cross perishes, I will no longer be safe from my own Innocence. Azazel will be able to tear me apart from the inside."

Allen could feel the angel running out of patience. Inside the clearing, the sky was beginning to roil with blacker clouds, drifting across the blazing star and sinking the inner world into a deep, restless gloom. It was uncomfortable to exist in. He could take back control, but it was the angel who had the majority of the information. It only made sense to let him do the talking. Instead, he took to pacing the perimeter of the clearing, counting his steps.

"No," Krory said at last. "I would like to help Allen. I owe him very much, and the idea of winning the war is very tempting. But I'm afraid I do not think you will succeed, and as I said, I cannot leave Lavi to fight alone."

"You are a fool," Neah hissed, but there was nothing he could do. The spells would not work on an unwilling target. The magic, the soul, and the Innocence must all align and remain aligned.

Four refusals. Only Miranda and Lenalee remained. If they refused, Allen, Neah, Cross and Kanda would have to go it alone. The already suicidal mission would become essentially impossible. The gloom within the inner world deepened and began to thicken like sludge, suffocating Allen.

Miranda next.

"I'll ruin it," she said, drawing her knees up to her chest and staring at them with a plaintive expression. "I have no offensive power, and everything seems to go wrong when I'm around. I'm bad luck. You shouldn't want me with you."

Allen seized control before Neah could open his mouth, despite the angel's furious protests. He seemed to think it would be more advantageous for Allen's survival to remain a secret, an ace in the sleeve, but Allen knew this was worth the risk. "Miranda," he said gently, taking her hand.

"Allen?" she whispered, amazed, tears welling up in her sunken eyes. "You're all right! The angel said so, but I wasn't sure if I could believe him or not. I was so worried. So very worried. Very, very worried. I'm so glad you're safe."

He smiled helplessly. She really was very endearing, he thought, despite how painful it was to be with her and watch her tear herself apart over every minor failure. "I'm fine, Miranda, I promise. Please don't worry any more. I came out because I think you might listen a little better if I say it instead of Neah, who's a stranger to you: we want you on this mission. I want you on this mission. You've saved me and all the others so many times, and... things go bad because you're on the _battlefield_, Miranda, not because _you're_ on the battlefield. It's not your fault that you can't protect us from everything. It's enough - more than enough - that you protect us from what you can. Please. Please come with us. We need you."

She wavered, then broke down in blubbery tears. "I'm scared," she sobbed, "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Will it really be all right?"

Allen shrugged. "To be honest, I don't know. It's a battle. Things always go wrong. But we'll have a better chance of coming out of it alive if you're with us."

Miranda groped around her night table blindly for a moment, then came up with a wrinkled red handkerchief. She wiped her tears and blew her nose noisily. "All right," she said. "All right. I'll try."

At last!

"Thank you," said Allen with real relief. "Thank you, Miranda. We'll come get you when it's time. Go back to sleep. Try not to worry."

She laughed at that, a bitter, sarcastic sound. Though she was young, the hollows her eyes stared out from and her harsh frown lines meant that the sound didn't sound strange coming from her as it would from anyone else her age. Her life had aged her, body and soul, faster than was kind. Allen tried not to think about the average life expectancy of an Exorcist.

"Lenalee will come," she called after them just as the door closed behind them.

Allen hoped she was right.

Lenalee sat in stony silence while they explained, not a trace of sleep-stupor on her face. She had not slept. That didn't surprise him. Of all of them, she was the one who thought the most about the war's effects on her comrades, and the most realistically about their future. Miranda came a close second, but her terror drove her imaginings off the tracks quite often, into the territory of unlikely tragedy. There were plenty of likely tragedies, which Lenalee thought about instead. In the daylight, in the company of her friends, she was happy and generous with her smiles, but Allen had long suspected she was a different person in the dark. This confirmation did not bring him any joy.

"I'll do it," she said, before Neah could even finish.

That did not surprise him either.

"You agree so readily," Neah said, surprised and wary. "Why?"

She shrugged. "I hate God," she said simply. "I hate Him just as much as I hate the Earl. He's the reason my brother threw his life away, the reason he's had to make all these hard decisions and cry so much. I've seen how awful ordinary human beings can be to each other, without even one good reason. I've seen how terrible the Innocence can be when it's angry. When _He's_ angry. He's cruel and I hate him. If you're going to kill him and end this war, I'm with you no matter what. For the sake of a world where I can live with my brother in peace."

Allen could feel the angel's admiration, and shared it. In many ways, she was the strongest of all of them. "What will this brother of yours think of you doing this?"

"It's not his decision," she said flatly. "I'm going."

"Thank you," Neah said quietly. "Your power will be of great assistance to us. We will come and find you when it's time."

"Wait."

Neah paused and turned back, hand on the cold iron doorknob.

Lenalee's eyes were dark as the undersea, full of heavy, oppressive shadows. "When this is over, I'm taking Allen back," she told the angel. "I won't let you stay in there. You have no right."

"I'd say that's up to him, wouldn't you?" replied Neah with a devilish smirk.

Allen felt uneasy. He hadn't thought that far ahead. What would he do when - if - when - they won their victory? In the new and improved post-God world, what would Samael do? Allen knew he wanted to live with Lilith-Hevlaska, but how did he plan to accomplish that without a body of his own? The uneasiness grew, but there was no time to pay more attention to it.

The Ark needed programming. It was going somewhere new today.

x.x.x

An hour after the angel left, Kanda got up, got dressed, and left.

As he passed each of his comrades' rooms, he considered pausing to say goodbye, but decided against it every time. If the angel was persuasive, he would see them again in the final battle. If they were not convinced, visiting them would only give them a chance to delay him, tie him down.

He couldn't hate them. They were victims, just as Alma had been. It was the Order itself which deserved his hate, and the God behind it. His mouthpieces resided below, calm and arrogant in their power, sitting tall and proud in their high-backed chairs like kings.

It surprised him to learn that besides hearing the voice of God, they had little else in the way of power. They died with hardly a protest. He left Mugen sheathed at his hip, half-shattered as it was and loyal to God besides, and used his hands. It was easy. So easy.

The alarm went up moments before he stepped into the Ark. They would follow him, but they would never find him. The white city had become familiar to him. He knew the layout of its streets and many of its hidden places. Losing the pursuit was even easier than killing the Grand Generals had been. This was what he had been loyal to all these years? They were useless. Useless and ineffective and sick. He was done with them. Completely done.

The sense of freedom made his limbs - fully repaired now - feel light as ghosts. He glided through the Ark, noticing as he went that the door to the North America branch was splintered and crooked on its hinges. Had Allen tried to close the way behind him? It didn't matter now. There hadn't been any point to his last gift, except to let Kanda hear Alma's last words in peace and quiet and privacy. What Alma was now needed no hiding place.

Kanda, however, did need somewhere to hide, somewhere no one would think to look except Allen and his Noah. So perhaps it did have a point after all.

Daylight sifted through the clogged windows near the roof, casting a dim grey light over the ruined hall and its rolling dunes of dust and broken stone. Alma was where Kanda had left him, sightless glass eyes staring down through the rows of crumbling columns at the far wall.

If Alma could have moved, even to look at something more interesting or arrange what was left of himself into a more comfortable position, he would have; but here he was, exactly as Kanda had left him. Dead.

Kanda carefully sat down, perhaps ten feet away, and let the understanding tear through him as it would. Alma was dead, and the most Kanda could do for him now was avenge him and save his soul from Hell. He could not show him any gardens or build any houses with him. He could not drag him into the sunlight and feel it warm his living skin. Even if he saved his soul, Alma would go elsewhere, and he would still be here, alone and grieving. There was nothing left here to further break his heart, and nothing here to mend it.

Alone in the abandoned city of ghosts, hidden from the sun and all human eyes, Kanda sank his head onto his knees and cried.

And then, some long while later, like a mirage of joy, he saw the door to joy open again. Just a crack, but the light streaming from it blinded him. An idea. There was a way. He would have to speak to the angel about it to confirm, and that would be difficult without revealing himself, but it could be done.

There was still hope.

x.x.x

The frigid wind gusting in from the sea tugged fretfully at the cavern entrance, but inside it was warm enough and well-constructed for human comfort. The Akuma army had had little else to do, but it still seemed to him to be a frivolous thing to waste their enormous power on while preparing for such a great battle. He did have to admit that it was necessary, however, after spending all of five minutes outside of it surveying the landscape and losing all feeling in his fingers.

It was a mountain, rearing its frozen dragon's head high out of the Antarctic sea. Heavy blankets of ice covered most of it, but where the sea crashed around its ankles it was jagged and black. At its summit, a lake of ice sat motionless and silent within a wide caldera, beneath which a second lake of fire slumbered fitfully.

The angel had chosen it at Allen's behest. If they were to summon God down from his heavens and strike at him, it would likely be very chaotic and destructive. The death toll under Azazel's name was already high enough. Neah had originally planned to stage his final battle in some continental desert, but none of them were entirely uninhabited, and Allen had put his foot down. So here they were - lost at sea, a thousand miles from any kind of land, perched on a bit of ice and rock like ants clinging to bits of leaves in the maelstrom of the river.

And thanks to the various magics of Neah and the Earl's kindred, completely hidden from the eyes of God until they chose to reveal themselves.

From the relative safety of his own mind, Allen watched with unsettled awe as the angel set about constructing his apocalyptic army.

Once their volcanic palace was complete and comfortably housing the entirety of the living Noah clan, Neah and Cross set their plan in motion. First, they contacted both of the consenting warriors still with the Order using enchanted pendants Cross had given them, which heated and hummed against their skin to signal them.

Miranda came through the gate first, perhaps two hours later. An enormous long object wrapped in cloth was slung over her thin shoulders.

"Did they give you any trouble?" Cross asked, lounging with his back against the warm stone wall of what had apparently become the war room.

She shook her head, visibly amazed that she had come through unscathed. "No. Everything is such a mess right now with Headquarters shifting operations to the new base. The Ark is full of people going back and forth between all the bases, evacuating people and gathering supplies. No one even noticed. The guard in the room stopped us, but I told her it was on Rouvelier's orders."

Cross grinned approvingly at her. "Wasn't sure you had it in you. Good job. Where's Lenalee?"

"She'll be a little while longer," Miranda said apologetically. "Kanda... she had to go find him."

The hesitation interested both Allen and Neah, but it was Tyki who asked, drifting into the room with a predatory smile on his face. "Oh dear, was he a bad boy? I wondered if he would be able to keep a handle on himself. Seems not."

Miranda blushed with pain and secondhand shame. "The Grand Generals are dead," she whispered.

Tyki cackled, and the surge of vindictive glee in Neah was almost overpowering to Allen.

The Grand Generals, dead? Kanda had killed humans? Having seen what he had, Allen found it hard to blame or judge him, but it still hurt him to think of. The Order had made Kanda an Exorcist to protect humanity. The Order had betrayed him, but Allen had hoped he would still want to protect humanity even despite that. Perhaps he had not thought of the Grand Generals as human. Come to think of it, he had no proof that they _were_ human. They looked human, but so did Lilith, who was very far from it. Would Azazel trust human mouthpieces, or would he create puppets without free will to be absolutely sure? Either way, they couldn't know, and Kanda couldn't have known either.

Allen sat on the stone throne and drew his knees up to his chest, sorrowing for his friend. He had no time to think further about it, however, because Miranda had slung the huge package off her shoulder.

Neah took a delicate step back as she unpacked the contents of her burden on the stone floor of the cavern: Crown Clown, ferociously reflecting the red light of the dozen hanging lanterns. Seeing it now, knowing what was behind it, Allen couldn't help but feel a little revulsion to look at it. Had it helped him all those times because it was good, or had it helped him because he had been acting in line with Azazel's wishes? Would it still feel like a friend in his hand now, or would it turn on him and tear his throat out with his own claws?

The angel's mixed reaction of hatred and fear told him clearly enough: as long as it was only Innocence, it was Azazel's soldier, and its feelings - if it had them - did not matter. Though Allen's hand ached to reach out for it, he let Neah clench them behind his back and hold them there.

Tyki came forward and placed seven long crystals on the floor beside it. They were black and glossy, like obsidian, but they seem to have their own internal light, a soft blueish heat. Crown Clown suddenly shuddered and glowed a deeper, sullen red, writhing away from it like it was poisonous. Dark Matter.

"We had best get this over with as soon as possible," Neah said neutrally, though his mind was roiling against Allen's.

Tyki loudly cleared his throat. "Attention, everyone! It's time. Get in here."

The Noah and the Earl filed in in a messy line, arranging themselves in a wobbly standing circle around Cross and Neah. Cross held his left hand up. Without hesitation, Neah reached out and grasped it with his right, then had Miranda touch his armless left shoulder, and so on until the the last person in the circle - the Earl - put his gloved hand on Cross Marian's shoulder and closed the circle.

A toothy, half-feral grin raked across his face. "Hold on to your hats, ladies and gentlemen."

He reached out for the furiously rattling hilt of Crown Clown. Its form glowed and warped, the tip of the blade forking into twisted claws which scrabbled desperately against the floor. Too late. His fingers closed firmly around it, and the room imploded.

The Earl and Neah seemed to be taking in a vast influx of energy from the other members of the circle, then corralling it and feeding it to Cross in even threads like spinning wool.

For the first time, Allen saw his mentor work at the height of his strength, and began to understand how little of Cross Marian he or anyone else at the Order had known. He had known that Cross was a magician. He had not really understood what that meant. He'd seen Cross disguise himself, reanimate and control the dead like puppets, and come back from the dead. He hadn't met Chomesuke, but he suddenly remembered now how the others had described her, how Cross had reprogrammed her Dark Matter to serve himself.

That was what he was doing now, in a way, but on a much greater and more complex scale. Crown Clown was one of the most powerful Innocence weapons in existence, a thousand times more powerful than any Level Two Akuma, and could not be entirely repurposed. The will of its Maker was much of what gave it its power, and stripping that away would only weaken it.

The Dark Matter crystals abruptly dissolved into black puddles and ran into each other, forming a pool which crept first slowly, then with gathering speed towards Crown Clown's panicked mangled claws. "Be a good boy," Cross muttered under his breath as he narrowed his eyes and shifted his grip on the hilt. The Dark Matter twisted into a long, flattish ribbon and rose from the floor like a flaring cobra, paused for a moment, then struck all at once. Crown Clown let out a piercing metallic shriek of rage as the ribbon twisted around it, binding its claws together and forcing it back down into its blade form. It kept going, pinching tighter and tighter, winding around until it looked like a deadly barber's pole, thinning and refining the blade down until it was only two inches wide.

Allen tried to shut his ears to the awful, tortured sound of its wailing, but it pierced through his mind like a storm of sharp-edged hail. He cowered on the throne and wished desperately there was something he could do to reassure it. _It's all right_, he thought at it, as if thoughts could travel like words: _I'm so sorry. I have to do this for my friends. You've been my partner and friend for so long... just help me this once more, and you'll be free._

It may have been his imagination, but it seemed to him that the wailing abated a little, and its thrashing calmed. He could see feel Miranda sobbing quietly beside him, clutching his shoulder as if it was all that was holding her up.

Cross gritted his teeth, sweat beading on his brow. Where the light and dark stripes met, lines of red light flashed for a moment, then dimmed and vanished. The room fell abruptly silent. Crown Clown lay still and quiescent on the stone floor, unrecognizable and strangely beautiful. It was perhaps five feet long, but very thin, and ribbed all down its length with black, white, and very thin dark red stripes. Only its hilt still resembled its old self, with its straight golden crossguard and broad grip.

"Um," said Miranda timidly after a few moments. "What... what did you just do, General Cross? What is this?"

The rakish grin flared back, though he looked somewhat tired. "Isn't it obvious? I've made us a bona-fide abomination. Here." He picked up the strange new sword and handed it to Neah, who gingerly accepted it and braced. The sword hummed gently, but otherwise did nothing. "See?" Cross said smugly.

Miranda's eyes widened. "I don't understand," she whispered.

Cross rolled his eyes. "Innocence alone couldn't affect Azazel, its maker. Dark Matter alone couldn't do it either, because he has the ability to destroy it. Same for human magic - wouldn't work on him directly, though thankfully it's not sourced in his power. But if we mix all three of them together using human magic as the buffer to keep the Dark Matter and Innocence from annihilating each other, the Innocence becomes contaminated with Dark Matter and the Dark Matter becomes contaminated with Innocence. Azazel can't prevent Innocence from entering his body since it's... well, made of him. As a weapon, it's technically not that much more powerful than it was before, but..."

"But what?" she prompted, round-eyed.

"Hang on," he said, "we've got company."

The Ark's doorway, set againt the far wall of the cavern, flickered. Lenalee stepped out, dressed in full battle gear and wearing a triumphant smile. A small black satchel hung from her left hand.

"Lenalee!" Miranda cried, letting go of the hand holding her left hand and throwing her arms around her friend's neck. "You're early!"

Lenalee returned the embrace but said nothing, turning around to look back at the gate. Someone else was stepping out of it, haggard but straight-backed and tense with energy: Kanda. He looked even thinner, somehow, like the rage burning inside him had hollowed him out and used his body as fuel. Mugen hung battered and bent at his hip. His eyes scanned the room with an expression of distaste, then fixed on Allen's.

Allen pushed Neah down and took control. "Thanks for coming," he said quietly.

The old Kanda would have sneered and said something about how it wasn't for Allen's sake, he was just doing what needed to be done. This Kanda only held his gaze and nodded grimly. He didn't need to say anything - Allen could guess at, if not truly understand, the poisonous depths of his need for vengeance against the being who had torn his life apart over and invented the Hell Alma's soul now suffered in.

Cross made an unhappy noise. "What did you do to your sword, you idiot?"

Self-hatred flashed across Kanda's face for a moment, then vanished in favour of a stony mask. "It broke," he said shortly.

"I'm not sure we'll have time to fix something that messed up," Cross said flatly.

Neah surged back into control and frowned. "Well, he can't go without a weapon. That would defeat the entire purpose."

Cross shrugged.

Crown Clown - it really needed a new name - hummed quietly in Allen's hand. He concentrated on it, curious as to whether it had really accepted its new self, was simply lobotomized and no longer aware of its own feelings, or was hiding its rage and waiting for an opportunity to strike back. It was easier to do without the distractions of having to listen or see or keep his balance; there was nothing to do down in the roofless halls of his heart but think and observe. So it was that he noticed what Neah didn't, and perhaps couldn't.

He pushed to the surface and waved his hand with wild excitement. "I know what to do!" he said, hoisting the dark holy sword to chest height and beaming at it with gentle affection. "I know what to do. Thank you, Crown Clown."

"Mind sharing?" Cross cut in dryly.

Allen turned to face him. "That thing you did, the conversion process - I think it unbound Crown Clown from my soul. Whatever this sword is, it's not Crown Clown anymore. It's still in there, and still aware, but I can't feel its ties to my soul any more. It's more than it was, now. Capable of working even without being bound to its wielder." He strode across the room to Kanda. "Here. Don't worry, I'm pretty sure it won't bite."

Raising an eyebrow, Kanda accepted the blade and gave it an experimental swing. It sang a little in the still air. "It's not as good as Mugen," he declared flatly, but he didn't give it back.

"Be good to it," Allen said, feeling the sudden urge to cry. Crown Clown had been part of him for so long. Giving it to someone else after getting back for only a few minutes seemed to make the empty space where it had been feel that much larger and darker. "Don't break it."

"What will you fight with, then?" Lenalee asked curiously.

Allen put his hand to the tender spot under his sternum. The wound Kanda had given him was nowhere near healed yet. After taking over, Neah had sealed it shut and helped accelerate the healing process, he was nowhere near fighting fit yet. The angel had, as a precaution against interference from Azazel, eliminated the traces of Innocence in his bloodstream, which left the newly healed spot on his heart vulnerable as well. If Allen changed his mind and ousted the angel now, he would likely die. If he stuck with Neah and fought, he would still possibly die. He was asking far too much of his body.

"I'll think of something," he said with a sunny smile.

"But-" Lenalee began to protest.

"Lenalee," he interrupted. "I'll be fine."

There was a long history of lies between them. What was one more?

She sighed and let it go, then brought her satchel to the front and dumped it out on the floor without ceremony. Two dozen cubes of Innocence tumbled out, glowing resentfully pale green, in sickly contrast to the ruddy glow of the lanterns.

Cross cracked his knuckles. "Everybody gather round! This is not a fun camping trip, we're here to work, so sit down and brace yourselves. I'm going to need everything you can give me if this is going to work. Don't worry if you pass out, you'll have a little time to recover before we head out for the big showdown."

Miraculously, everyone obeyed, Exorcists and Noah sitting down together in a messy, resentful knot of people on the warm stone floor.

Allen tried to picture the future beyond this moment, the world beyond their tiny vanishing island in the heart of the sea, and found that he couldn't. When they were ready, they would drop the enchantments hiding the island from God's eyes and call him down to earth... and then what? What would that look like? What would _He_ look like? It seemed absurd that they were even contemplating going after him with their silly sharpened sticks and stones, let alone believing for a moment it could work. And what would a world without Him look like? Left to its own devices, free to choose its own path without interference at last - what would humanity do?

_Wait and see, Allen Walker_, Neah murmured within their shared mind. _Patience._

**X.x.x.x.X**


	5. Deicide

x.x.x

_05. Deicide_

x.x.x

It felt strange, to put it mildly, to be standing at the abandoned edge of the world waiting for God to smite him.

The anticipation of battle had always had a conflicting effect on Kanda. It made him sick to his stomach, which was probably only natural, but it also sent a hum running through his limbs which came closer to excitement than anything else. He was not glad to be facing pain and torn flesh and broken bones, but he was... excited. There was something in his blood - maybe the Order had put it there, he couldn't be sure - which answered to the banshee cry of battle.

The sword which had once been Allen's was restless in his hand, beating like a heart against his palm.

At his left hand stood Neah. Kanda could tell because of the casually arrogant posture, though the angel had not spoken in some time. There was something of Allen in the watchful movements of his left eye, however. To Allen's left was the Earl, naked without his jovial mask, and beyond him stood Cross and Miranda. At Kanda's right was Lenalee, a buffer between him and the ranks of Noah. There was no point to standing in a line, really, aside from the psychological effects, but any edge they could give themselves seemed worth it.

The wind tore across the sea from the west, rank with salt, hardly pausing to notice the tiny heap of rock obstructing its mighty course. The ocean tore sullenly at the black cliffs downslope from where they stood. It was a beautiful day, comparatively: the sun glared heatlessly down from the glacier-blue sky, and what clouds there were seemed little more than decorative. The island had turned out in its Sunday best for the end of the world.

They were as ready as they could be. It probably would not be enough.

"Azazel," said Lilith, not loudly. She stood at the edge of the cliff, surrounded and defended from behind by the half-circle of Noah and Exorcists. It seemed right to them to face north, though they could not say why. "Azazel, come down."

It was also strange to hear her voice. It was Hevlaska's voice, but her current body was far too small to create such a sound. The ground should not tremble when a girl smaller even than Lenalee opened her mouth. The sound of her words should not pound through the air like vast drums, and yet it did.

And God listened.

The air over the cliffside shimmered and split like the skin of a rotten fruit. The dark gap spilled its poisonous contents onto the hillside: a tumbling flood of befuddled Finders, perhaps two hundred of them, and behind them...

"You bastard," he heard Lenalee choke.

...Behind them, nine confused Exorcists. He had even dragged poor wounded Marie and the untrained newbies out of bed to come fight his battles for Him. Lavi and Krory stood at the forefront of the little black knot amid the sea of Finder beige. Lavi stared at Lenalee in horror, having used his formidable brain to come to the obvious conclusion first. Krory followed quick on his heels, enormous sorrow sagging his face and curling his shoulders. The generals were next to cotton on to the situation at hand, and the black homicidal fury on their faces told Kanda very clearly that his comrades would not be given time to explain themselves.

He was proven right. The shocked impasse lasted only moment. Then Nyne bellowed "Traitors!" and the milling Finders found something to organize themselves around.

She had always seemed the gentlest of the Generals. Kanda had sometimes wondered how she had become a General at all, with her mild demeanour and distaste for violence. Now he knew. She was an unholy force when angry. Her beautiful scarred face twisted like a demon's mask as she tore her cruel red whip through the air, the centre of the suddenly coordinated force. Winters smiled his ferocious bladed smile at her side. Tiedoll just looked sad.

Kanda fended off the first wave of Finders, not bothering to try not to kill them. He had enough sins on his back to have earned the death sentence already. All that mattered now was winning. His comrades deserved the peaceful world the angel had drawn for them, but Kanda had no place in it, and knew it full well.

The Noah moved as one, before the Exorcists even had time to react, as if they shared part of a mind between them. Finders died in droves, faceless white flies. The ranks flattened and parted until the knot of Exorcists lay exposed like a rotten heart.

It was wrong to hang back and let the Noah handle this, Kanda knew, but his feet seemed frozen to the ice under them. That was not a faceless Finder Tyki was squaring off with. It was Krory, someone who had fought at his side to further his goals at his own expense. The person facing the Earl, lonely green eye cold as mountain lakes, was not only a fellow warrior. He was Lavi, someone who had counted Kanda as a friend for years, and if Kanda was honest, was someone Kanda had also counted as a friend for nearly as long. Those were comrades. Those were friends. How many times was he doomed to repeat his mistake with Alma?

"Move, you idiot mortals!" Neah snarled. "If you're too soft to kill them, subdue them! Azazel will not show himself until he has exhausted his supply of puppets."

Blank-eyed with horror, Lenalee moved to obey, knocking Chaoji Han unconscious with a blow from each of her heels. Tears ran unheeded from her eyes as she spun to meet the next threat: Winters. Her face hardened. She had never liked him, Kanda knew. Perhaps that made it easier.

He had no more time to think about it. His own opponent had arrived.

"Whatever you think you're doing, Yuu, you-"

"Save it, gramps," he muttered, then hoisted the strange striped sword and swung it toward his friend and mentor's head.

Tiedoll dodged, but only just barely. "You're being deceived!" he cried.

Kanda thought about trying to yell his explanations over the thunderous din of battle. He thought about trying to save Tiedoll, who had only ever been kind to him, who deserved sparing if anyone did. Then he thought about how long Tiedoll had been with the Order, then kinds of things he must have learned in all those long years, all the things he had to have known about and never tried to stop. Alma wasn't his fault. But Alma _was_ his fault, in that it was the fault of everyone who knew and looked away for the sake of victory. Tiedoll didn't deserve to die. Death wasn't something that could be deserved in the first place.

He thought of Alma's soul, shrieking in Hell, and fighting Tiedoll suddenly didn't seem hard at all.

Kanda would show them he could be just as terrible as they were. It wasn't justified, wasn't right, but he had nothing better to do that seemed at all worth doing.

"Yuu," Tiedoll panted desperately, trying to gain enough distance to activate Maker of Eden.

That was the trouble with magic-type weapons. They were very useful, as long as one had the distance and time to use them properly. If he activated Maker of Eden here, he would put the Order's forces in as much danger as the angel's. If he used Embracing Garden, he would only trap the battling forces together in a small area. He deserved his title, but this battlefield was far from ideal for his style.

It was perfect for Kanda's - close range, melee-style free-for-all carnage.

If this were any other battle he would have been smiling. Fate rarely handed him circumstances so perfectly calculated to give him victory.

Tiedoll continued pleading, and it continued almost working until Kanda caught him an awful blow to the shoulder. The blood was immediate and volumous. Tiedoll dropped to one knee.

"I don't want to kill you, old man," Kanda said.

Tiedoll's great grey eyes peered up at him. He had lost his glasses at some point, and they weren't just for show. "Please, Yuu," he said, almost too softly to be heard over the battlefield. "This isn't you."

Actually, it was, but it stung a bit anyway. There had always been a part of him leftover from his previous life which yearned to be the kind of person Tiedoll seemed to think he was, the kind of person Allen had somehow seen through the thick layers of black and red glass between then and now. The kind of person Alma's first self had fallen in love with.

He hesitated.

It was enough time for someone else to act. Every bone in Tiedoll's body broke at once. He splayed out over the frozen ground, a ruined red puppet leaking blood and letting out little hitching shrieks, hardly recognizable as a person anymore. Kanda stared and stared and stared. Cyril swept past him, tossing him a sardonic smile and wave. Tiedoll sobbed and twitched his useless limbs for what seemed like an eternity, then went mercifully still.

Kanda bent over and was noisily sick.

"Azazel," he rasped when he had finished. "Get your ass down here."

It was far too quiet for anyone to hear, but God was supposedly omniscient or close to it. Surely he had heard. Surely he knew that if he didn't descend and face Kanda directly, Kanda would climb the sky to find him.

The battle raged on unabated. If God had heard, he was not impressed.

Above the surging tides of red-stained Finder robes and tattered black coats, Kanda caught a glimpse of Neah's pale head and made for it. The angel was fighting back to back with Lilith. People fell in waves before them, dead or unconscious without a wound on them. Even from here, Kanda could tell that the angel was holding back. He didn't know why - wouldn't it be faster just to flatten everything? Maybe Allen was demanding leniency. That would make sense, but... couldn't he see that was making everything worse? It would be so much kinder to just end it quickly instead of leaving it to Lenalee to bash in the heads of people she loved and hope they would live through it.

"Azazel!" Neah bellowed. "Enough of this, you coward! Show yourself!"

The sun flickered and died for the space of one heartbeat, then two. The battle paused, every neck craning skyward to see what had caused the disruption.

High above the battlefield, there was an angel. Kanda wondered dimly if he had chosen his appearance to play on Biblical descriptors, or if he had directed the authors to describe him. He was perhaps thirty feet tall, draped in robes so white they hurt the eyes. His long golden hair trailed down his straight back between the roots of his vast wingspread, and his eyes glowed in his inhumanly perfect face. A ring of light spun silently over his head. He was flawless, radiant, a glory to behold.

Kanda had never hated anything or anyone as much as he hated Azazel in that moment. He had thought Noah smelled of evil. In comparison, Azazel reeked. The feeling of wrongness emanating from his flawless form made Kanda gag. His stomach was long empty, but he couldn't seem to stop. Corruption and rot were pleasant and natural and good. This spoke more of life prolonged and hollowed out, the saccharine stench of preservatives and false vitality.

"There you are," he muttered. A fierce and unhappy smile split his face. At long last, he would have his revenge.

A quick glance around the battlefield showed him a hundred things he would never forget seeing. Krory had shed his useless skin shell and was striding about the field as a bloody demon with only an impression of a face. Kanda could not tell who he was attacking, but thought it might be one of the Finders. Lavi's ragged form was only a few steps behind him, bleeding from three different places. His hammer trailed him on a long handle, gathering mud and slush and spilled blood. Nyne was down, staring sightlessly at the perfect empty sky. Winters was only using his right arm. The elder Bookman was indisputably dead.

Worst, though, were the faces of his comrades. Miranda was weeping openly, perched high on a stone out of reach of the main battle. Lenalee's eyes were hollow and black. She would not come out of this intact. Allen's right eye was alight with glee, the angel seeing his vision unfold before him, but his left was a gaping spiral of horror and grief. They would _none_ of them come out of this intact. A line had been crossed which should never have been drawn.

Even now, Kanda could not see any better way. This was the kind of world Azazel had built.

A smooth, mellifluous tenor voice sang through the air. "How dare you? I am no coward."

"Miranda! Now!" Neah shouted.

Time froze.

Azazel's angelic face paused in an expression of startlement. Cross' mad gamble had worked after all - Miranda's Time Record, corrupted and reforged with Dark Matter, was capable of influencing even its original maker. It seemed that the One God, the True God, had not left them entirely powerless after all. If they should disapprove of their steward, perhaps it was written into the laws that he could be overthrown.

Kanda realized he could move. The rest of the field was still frozen, but he and a handful of others still had power over their limbs. Neah. Lenalee. Lilith. Krory and Lavi. Those last confirmed Kanda's half-formed suspicion that they had never been truly committed to their decision to stay with the Order. They had always wanted to fight at their friends' sides. They had only needed an excuse. A little push.

"Go on," Neah rasped. "Lilith and I will hold him. Do what you came here to do."

Kanda needed no encouragement. He nodded stiffly and shifted his grip on the halfblood sword's hilt.

"Hurry!" Miranda cried. "I don't think I can hold him for long."

So at the end it was the four of them, rushing from their respective corners of the battlefield. Lenalee's hands reached out and found Krory's and Kanda's. Together she launched them high into the air, her improved Dark Boots whistling a mad song. Lavi called on his hammer for assistance.

It shattered in his hands, slicing them to ribbons. That was the only warning they got.

Kanda, acting on some instinct he had no time to name or even recognize, threw himself sideways and knocked Lenalee and Krory out of the line of fire. It was probably too late for Krory, but Kanda had no time to look and confirm. Before Miranda's grip on the vengeful god slipped entirely, he had to strike a mortal blow.

Using gravity to his advantage, he positioned himself in the air so that his unholy sword point downwards and put his entire weight above it, knees clutching its hilt just below his hands. _Just half a second more_, he thought at Miranda and Neah and Lilith. _Please, just give me enough time to reach him._

Time slowed to a crawl, but dragged itself across the last few inches.

The sword touched the massive angel's forehead, slipped into its blinding flesh a quarter-inch-

The sound of Azazel's laughter echoed through the vast empty sky. Gravity ceased to exist. Kanda hung suspended like a black spider above his head, caught before he could deliver his fang's poison.

"This?" Azazel giggled. "This was your clever plan, little brothers? I am ashamed. I had hoped it would be at least a little more impressive."

Neah was nearly incandescent with fury. Light crackled from his pores. He said nothing.

What was he waiting for? Had Azazel done something to him? Was he paralyzed? Kanda willed him to move, take the next step in the plan, reveal the twist that would tip the battle in their favour. There had to be something. He would not have risked everything, including the life of the woman he loved, on a hopeless bet.

...Would he?

The terrible thought gnawed at Kanda. _He_ would not have taken this risk with Alma. But perhaps the angel had gone mad in his long years of hiding within Allen's soul. Perhaps he had simply wished to force the destruction of the world on his own terms, a desperate and silly grab for illusionary power. Was Hell even real? Did Samael have the power to implant feelings in a person's heart, like uneasiness and a sense of wrongness? Had his terror at Alma's departure been nothing more than an elaborate manipulation?

It was unlikely, Kanda knew, but still he could not shake the sinking feeling of betrayal.

Lilith stepped forward. "Azazel," she said.

Her eyes were clearly visible from this angle, golden and luminous in contrast with the silver-black world beneath the sky. When she had first opened them in his sight, he had felt the warmth and sorrow of Hevlaska in them and had forgotten his doubts. They had returned, but seeing those eyes again eased them. No one with eyes that beautiful and kind could possibly be a traitor. Kanda clung to that small thread of hope and waited.

Azazel laughed again. "Little scorpion," he said. "I remember you. I lost several good soldiers to your... wiles."

Despite his sneering tone, Lilith remained calm. "I only told them the truth," she said. "I have only ever told the truth."

"And what did it get you? Caught in the crossfire of a war you opposed, all your adopted children dead at your hand, a world half-emptied of magic. You should have stayed in your desert and counted the stars instead. Now you can stand and watch as they fall again, and this time I will not let you or anyone else make them anew."

While they spoke, some small movement caught Kanda's eye. It was very subtle, and half-cloaked in shadows, but his eye caught a faint flash of white and red from some ten feet behind Lilith. He tried to focus, though it was difficult with his frozen eyes. Who was it?

Neah. He had retrieved something from within a hollow in the stony hillside, and was now pretending to be frozen again. Surely Azazel had noticed? But no - Samael's cloaking powers had hidden this island from Azazel up until now. It wasn't impossible that he could hide his own presence, even in plain sight, if only for a few moments.

The world seemed to be funneling down, distilling to this one little point of rock in the sea, this one little moment in the endless reach of time. Kanda had no idea what was going to happen next, but he was ready to react no matter what it was. He had come this far. He would finish what he had started.

"What is it you want, then? An empty world?" The Earl now, picking up where Lilith had left off. Her golden eyes were probably incapable of tears, but Kanda got the sense she was crying. Azazel had hit a nerve somewhere.

God shrugged. "No. I will make something else. Something just mine, something the One God has never touched."

"How dull," said the Earl. "Won't you tire of watching them react just as you programmed them to? Don't you enjoy your games with this silly race because you do not know the extent of their reality? The One God wrote them large and strange. You have spent all these years exploring the depths and heights of their coded labyrinth. That's what you love, isn't it? The exploration, the puzzle. You will have none of that with a race of your own making. I know I can't talk you out of it, but you shouldn't lie to yourself about that."

Azazel glared. "Then I will find the part of them that allows them to defy me and burn it away."

The Earl giggled. "You mean free will? That's the random element which allows their code to be so complex. Take that away, and they'll collapse down into a few small, simple layers." After saying this, the Earl's jaw clicked shut. Muffled sounds rummaged around in his throat, but found no escape. Apparently Azazel had tired of listening to him.

"I will decide after I have cleaned the slate," he announced. "Which reminds me-"

Neah chose this moment to act. He hurled the objects hidden in his hand straight towards Azazel's face, one and then the other. They sparkled in the air, then paused mid-flight. Only for a moment. They resumed their arcing path, if more slowly than before, inexorably approaching Azazel's face.

Kanda could see them now. They were very small, only the size of worry stones or the bowl of a small wooden spoon, and were smooth and glossy. Stripes of black, white, and red curled across their surfaces. Kanda knew what they were. He waited with savage impatience for them to finish their long flight. Three feet, then two, then-

The small oblongs reached their target... and slipped into him like pebbles into water. Azazel stared down in horror at his chest, then let out a shriek which rendered every human on the battlefield agonizingly deaf. The island shuddered and cracked in half, the still lake of ice breaking to let the magma beneath spill out. The western river of magma missed the battlefield by only a few feet. Everyone standing on that side would come home with burns to the left side of their bodies, if they came home at all.

The moment stretched long, then snapped. Time restarted. The battlefield erupted in a cacophony of pain and terror.

Kanda fell the last few inches. His fangs finally reached their prey. The sword sank into Azazel's forehead and stuck. The halo flared wildly and wrapped around him like a living thing, burning the flesh away from his bones, blackening his bones until they split, roasting his heart of Dark Matter until it trembled and puddled in the dark cathedral of his ribs, then hissed away into the air like so much evaporating steam.

Kanda died.

**X.x.x.x.X**


	6. Suffering

x.x.x

_06. Suffering_

x.x.x

The unholy shriek fell abruptly silent. Azazel stared blindly, eyes rolled up towards the little thorn lodged in his forehead, while his hands clutched at his chest.

For a second, nobody moved. Then Neah, galvanized by the sight of red lines snaking outwards from the points of impact, turned and frantically howled at the army. "Into the cave! Now!"

To Allen, it seemed at first like a terribly stupid thing to order. The cave was crumbling, the caldera behind it roiling with lava. It was as likely to kill anyone who entered as anything else. Then he remembered: the Ark. Whatever Neah thought was coming, he didn't think the miserable, shredded human army would be able to withstand it.

Somehow the magnitude of what had just happened seemed to dissolve the tension between the opposing forces. Lenalee barked out orders, lining everyone up into orderly strings pointed at the cave door. Those still sporting functional limbs gathered the injured and dead. The ice ran red behind them. Neah raced over to the gate and hastily opened it without programming a destination, letting Lenalee and the Noah herd the dazed and staring lines of people into the white city beyond as fast as they could.

It wasn't fast enough. Allen could feel that certainty within Neah, could see it just by looking at how quickly the red lines were overtaking Azazel's skin, cracking him open like overheated crystal. They had seconds left, not the minutes they would need.

Neah waited until the absolute last second, then closed the gate, leaving a handful of Finders and the remaining Exorcists locked outside of it. It wasn't enough, but it was the most that could be done.

The last thing Allen saw was Lavi reaching out to enfold Lenalee in his arms, green eye calm with acceptance.

The world ended.

x.x.x

Kanda was dead.

His soul stood on a soft floor of something like moss. His vision was mostly obscured by thick rolling banks of warm fog, but sometimes through it he caught glimses of straight trunks and low-hanging needled branches. The air was lukewarm but oddly clear and easy to breathe, despite the fog. It was hard to think. The swirling patterns of white hypnotized him, and he was so comfortable. Nothing hurt. For the first time since he had died all those years ago, he felt no pain at all.

He had died many times before, of course, but even here he could tell this was different. He would not be gasping back to life five hundred seconds from now. His body would not reconstitute itself and draw him back into the harsh world of the living.

Kanda grinned. Everything had gone exactly as he'd hoped it would. Now all that was left was to find Alma and... rest.

He pushed his tired soul forward into the mist, following the distant sound of a familiar song.

x.x.x

An eternity later, the world lurched back into existence. Somehow, somehow, all was not lost.

Allen blinked grit out of his eyes and sat up to look around. His comrades and enemy-allies lay scattered around him, half-covered by drifts of fine golden sand. His own legs were partially submerged. The air was sere and dry, but cool. A dark dome of stars arced overhead, luminous at the edges with the reflected light of the soon-to-rise sun.

A desert. He couldn't tell which one. The stately cliffs of stone eroding patiently away to the north suggested China, but were by no means conclusive.

Standing up, he dusted himself off and took stock. His body was in terrible shape. There was no one thing very wrong with it, but it was battered and twitching with the aftershocks of adrenaline. The nausea was awful, but could be dealt with. It was much more important to find out who else was still alive, if anyone.

Lenalee was closest. He knelt beside her and shook her gently. She did not stir, but he could feel the warmth and steady rhythm of life under the bare skin of her arm. She was alive. Though he could not tell how far from death she was, it would have to be enough for now. Lavi lay just beyond her, also unconscious but breathing. Miranda lay perpendicular to them, her right hand stretched toward them, the Time Record still spinning fitfully on her wrist. She must have stopped their time before the explosion hit.

To the right Allen found all but four of the Noah clan laid out in a tidy line. Two of the remaining sat together at the far end of the line, close enough to share warmth but not touching. A few more steps, and Allen could identify them through the gloom - Tyki and Lulubell. None of the dark figures in the line were breathing. Their eyes were all neatly closed. Allen forewent asking the obvious question. "I'm sorry," he said, though he wasn't sure how much he really was. The Noah had fought for the vision of the future he and Neah shared, and for that he owed them some gratitude, but he also owed them quite a lot of hatred for all the things they had done before that.

Neither of them answered him, or even looked at him. He left them alone with their grief and moved on.

The Finders were, unsurprisingly, all dead. He stared at them for a few moments, willing himself to feel pain over their losses, but found only numbness. He could not hurt anymore. Not right now.

Next he found the other two surviving Noah, Road Kamelot and the Earl. That the Earl had survived was no surprise. Same for Road, he realized - how many times had they tried without success to wound her physical body? The blast may have reduced her to ash, but she could have easily rebuilt from that. Tyki had his ability to choose what to touch. Doubtless he had made himself fully permeable just before the shockwave hit and let the superheated bits of island pass right through him without harm. Lulubell had probably turned herself into a rock or something similar to weather the tempest. The abilities of the others had not afforded them such protection.

Winters was off by himself. His face was twisted with rage, but his half-open mouth was silent and full of sand. Last of all Allen found Cross, gathering the pieces of Maria's shattered corpse together into his spread coat.

And that was all. The entirety of what was left. Allen had no idea what had happened inside the Ark. He hoped they had all gotten away safely, but found it difficult to hope. Perhaps the entire world was like this now. No more ocean coasts, only vast chasms of dust where the water had been, and only sand and stone between them.

"Allen Walker," said a soft voice behind him.

He turned to find Hevlaska - Lilith - standing with her dark hands folded shyly together at her belly button. Her dark hair was full of snarls and fell in her face whenever the wind gusted. He stared into her tranquil glowing eyes and tried for a moment to forget where he was. Gently, she drew him back with a hand on his arm. "I am sorry for everything you have lost," she said. "I wish... if I had been closer to my full strength, I-"

"It's all right," he said flatly, though it wasn't, in any way. "Thank you for helping."

Neah chose this moment to awaken from his stupor. Allen found himself pushed violently out of the way as the angel rose swiftly to the surface, yelling frantically as soon as he found his voice. "_Did it work?_"

"Yes," said Lilith. "Yes, it worked."

Neah sagged. "Thank you. Thank you, my love. Could you... tell me what happened? Are we safe?"

Lilith hesitated for a moment, looked down, then steeled herself. "Your poison worked even better than you had hoped. It seems even you underestimated the power the One left in the hands of humans. Your friend's magic was... hardly short of a miracle. Azazel crystallized and broke apart. When the tumult eased, Lucifer called the remainder of his Akuma army and had them carry us away from the island. There was... very little left of it."

"What of the pieces?" Neah urged. "Did you-"

She nodded, then placed a thin palm flat against her slightly swollen belly. "Yes. I do not know what will come of this."

Neah threw his arm around her, dragging her tiny form hard into his chest. It was disconcerting for Allen to feel then the true force of his love, the love which had driven him into this suicidal crusade against every active power but hers, to hide himself away from Azazel's murderous gaze until the time was right with more patience than Allen could even conceive of, to risk everything for the sake of a world she would be happy living in. He felt like a voyeur. It was suddenly harder to believe that this was his body, that it had ever belonged to him. He felt as if he had only been keeping it safe for Neah for the sake of this reunion-

_No,_ he interrupted himself. _No, that's not how it is. This is mine. I was here first._

Tentatively, he tried for control. Neah pushed him back ruthlessly. He tried again, and was rebuffed with even greater force.

"Neah," he said, sitting down on the throne and leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. "I'll let you have this reunion. You've waited long enough for it. But you can't stay. This body is my home, not yours."

The angel appeared in the clearing ten feet from him. His eyes were cold as undersea stones. "You puny fool of a human," he said. "I'll leave when I want to, and not before."

He vanished, leaving Allen to watch him shower kisses on Lilith's forehead, eyelids, the corners of her mouth. In the rush of preparations and the insanity of battle, he had not had time to think about this, but now Allen had nothing but time left. He had always had the suspicion that Neah did not plan to relinquish his body, but he had always believed that if it came to it, he would be able to oust the angel by force. Now he was not so sure. He had witnessed the full extent of Neah's power in the battle, and was now increasingly afraid that the angel had been letting him seize control when he wanted to ease him into a sense of false security.

Panic kindled within him. "Get out," he said to the empty clearing, summoning all his will and throwing it against the amorphous presence of the angel somewhere overhead. "I know you won't die. I want my body back, so _get out_."

The angel hardly flinched.

The panic flared hot and consuming. "Get out!" he yelled. "Get out! Get out! Get out! Hevlaska-"

As if the mere thought of her name summoned her attention, he felt Lilith break away and take his face in her hands. "My love, what are you doing to this child?" she asked. Her tone was mild, but there was an edge to her voice. "He is crying out."

"Ignore him," Neah said roughly. "We are together, just as we have always wished, and this time there is no one left with the power to separate us. It is perfect."

She took a step back, letting her hands fall. "No," she said.

"...No?" Neah echoed, shocked. "What do you mean, no? I told you I would find a way, and I have."

"Not this way. That child has helped you - helped us both - in good faith. It would be wrong of you to renege on your half of the bargain. That is not something the Samael I loved would do."

Allen felt the angel's pain at that like a sledgehammer. He had spent so long in the dark, mulling over his plans and the pathways to freedom, that he had... warped, somehow, into a new and darker person than he had been before Azazel had stripped him powerless and sent him fleeing. It was the angel's own realization of how much he had changed that burned the worst. He had meant to stay pure and redeemed in the light of her love. He had meant to come out a stronger person, even more worthy of her. The realization that he had failed flayed at his heart.

"I..."

"Let me go, Neah," Allen said quietly. "You'll have lots of time to remember yourself and polish up your soul. You don't need me. You've been patient all this time. Be patient for just a little longer."

The angel fell silent, contemplating this. Allen began to hope that he and Lilith had gotten through. That hope died when he felt the enormous and inexorable pressure of Neah's will pushing him slowly down into the dirt of the clearing. It turned to mud around him, swallowing him further - up to his thighs, now, and still sinking.

"No," Neah said. "No. No more patience. I have earned this."

Allen strugged hopelessly against the sucking quagmire, knowing even as he did so that the angel was not someone he could win against. He would fight, and fight, and drag every last bit of strength out of his soul to throw into it, but this fight he would lose. He was simply too small to take on angels alone. He cried out for Mana for help, but saw then that even that small hope was beyond his reach - Mana's soul was inextricably linked with Neah's. His curse had been what planted the seed of the angel's soul within him. The angel and the curse were inseparable. It was just him, one young and terrified soldier, alone in the dark under the thumb of heaven.

As if from a great distance, then, he heard a soft voice. It took him a moment to understand what she had said, and by then the pain was stabbing deep into him and rendering him incapable of thought.

"I am sorry, Allen Walker, but I believe this is going to hurt."

The pain was endless, a sword ten thousand miles wide, so much larger than his tiny soul could take. It was like having his heart torn out through his splintering ribs. It was like being drawn and quartered except that his limbs would not break away, even though the release would be sweet by comparison, a clean tearing pain and then death. What he wouldn't give for death. He had always thought that those who wished for it were simply blind to their reasons to fight, but now he had to admit how wrong he had been. No reason could have any power in the face of this all-consuming, all-destroying agony.

Then, suddenly, as quick as it had come, the pain vanished.

Allen curled in on himself, sobbing shamelessly into the soft planes of sand under his cheek. The aftershocks of the pain rippled through him, still intolerable but so much smaller. These he could handle. He was bigger than these. "Annghuh," he moaned, spitting out a handle of enamel chips he had ground off his teeth.

A cool hand caressed his cheek. "I am sorry," Lilith said. "Warning you would not have helped."

"What did you do?" he croaked, his words squeezing through a throat wrenched tight by all the screams he had not managed to force out. "What _was_ that?" Then it hit him - the echoing silence in his mind, the fathomless hole within his soul. The way the pain centered on the left side of his face. He sat up, bracing himself with his hand to overcome the wave of dizziness. Wetness ran down his cheek and dripped into his lap, into the sand between his legs.

His left eye was gone, torn right out of his head by Lilith's slender fingers, and with it the curse of Mana and all that meant.

"What did you do with him?" he asked, amazed.

Echoing a moment from some time earlier, she flattened her palm against her belly and smiled. "I do not know what will come of this." She hesitated. "This one thing I do know. This world has no more need of gods or demons. It belongs to you, as it was meant to from the beginning."

Allen understood all of a sudden why Neah loved her. She was beautiful, to be sure, and warm and kind, but there was that quiet wisdom in her that ran deeper than the roots of the world. That wisdom was what had allowed her to see someone worth loving in a rebellious, selfish angel of death, what had allowed her to survive patiently through her years of captivity without letting her heart fester into hatred, what would let her find the way to happiness for the remnants of her kindred.

"What will you do?" he asked.

She shrugged - an oddly human gesture - and smiled. "I will gather what angels and demons remain, and take them with me into the stars. Together we will walk among them until we find a place to build our new home, and there we will live and try to learn about peace."

"And the Noah?

Together they glanced over to the sad line of corpses in the sand, though it hurt Allen terribly when the ruined muscles in his empty eye socket tried to move the eye which was no longer there.

"When we find our home, I will come back for them," she said at last. "They are immortal, in their strange way. It would be cruel to leave them here in this swiftly turning world without their friend and father. But they cannot come at first. They cannot breathe the void as we can."

"Oh," Allen replied. That seemed to be about all he could think of to say.

He was tired, he realized. Unbearably tired. The last wave of adrenaline was draining out of his system, leaving him battered and pale with blood loss. It was probably dangerous to sleep in this condition, but he could no more have helped it than stop the world turning.

Lilith's cool hands pulled his sagging head down into the firm pillow of her lap. Her fingers smoothed over his hollow socket, and the pain eased. "Rest," she murmured. "Rest, Allen Walker. You have done enough."

_Oh_, he thought dimly, _all right, I suppose._

And then he went sailing blissfully into the dark waters of sleep, and heard nothing more.

**X.x.x.x.X**


	7. Redemption

x.x.x

_07. Redemption_

x.x.x

Hell was already breaking up when Kanda found it, bereft of its master and architect. Even at the end of its glory, it was a terrible place.

The heat was awful, of course, searing and damp like a jungle despite the empty, dusty ground. All the water had leached from it into the air. The wind tasted like blood. The inversion of light and dark was disorienting as well - the sky was black, but the ground was pale and yellowish, where it wasn't aflame or recently burned out. He walked carelessly over long fields of coals, their eternal fire not yet entirely forgotten. The soles of his feet blistered and melted, but he paid them no heed. He was already dead. The pain was only there to torment him, not warn him of any real damage.

In the distance, in every direction, tall white spires of twisted bone scraped the scorched black sky. The wind was full of freed spirits, warped and howling in search of freedom and rebirth, writhing stormclouds of pale rage and horror. Other than them, there was little else but fire and stone and dust.

Somewhere in this ruined land, perhaps among the terrified clouds, roamed the soul he had come here for.

Somehow he did not think he would find Alma here, in the outskirts. Azazel would have dragged him right down to the center, where the fires burned hottest. Alma had lost himself to the enemy. His punishment would be especially harsh.

Therefore, ignoring the way Hell tore away at his spirit-body and sent breaking agony through him with every step, ignoring the way he could not breathe and could not see properly through his melting eyes, Kanda forged onward towards the white heart of the inferno. Alma was here somewhere. There was nothing else to do but find him and bring him out. Nothing else at all.

There was no way to count time in Hell. There was no sun - the white towers and the sullen glow of the ember-ground were the only illumination. There was no moon, no stars. Nothing changed. He had no heartbeat, no breath. The torment seemed to extend forever, though he thought it had only been a few hours at most since he had found his way out of the Purgatory of forest and fog.

Every now and then, he called out Alma's name. A hundred thousand souls screamed in response, but he never heard Alma's voice among them.

Slowly, the great coal plains broke up into jagged mountains and gorges, every stone's edge a razor which cut his feet. He scrambled through their treeless heights and depths, keeping his face aimed at the heat he could feel from the center to keep himself from getting lost. The stones flayed his skin away, and again and again it grew back.

As he went further in, it grew steadily quieter. The wind became empty of souls as they each found their way out and up. The coals cooled and stopped crackling. At last there was only the shuffle of his ruined feet against the stones, and the still-distant echo of that familiar discordant song.

Alma had always loved to sing. Tone-deaf idiot.

As Hell died around him, his progress became easier - the heat eased, the air cleared, the stones softened. He understood without relief, however, that if he took too long, Hell would disintegrate entirely, taking both he and Alma with it. He gritted his teeth and moved faster.

To keep his mind off the pain and focused on what was important, he made himself try and remember Alma; both the Alma he knew and the Alma who had haunted his dreams and visions.

Try as he might, at first he could bring up nothing more of the first Alma beyond the garden and her smile. The second Alma was much easier - that Alma he couldn't forget, even back when he wanted to.

He remembered waking up in his pool, cold and weightless, to Alma's face. How he'd know it was a face even though he couldn't recall ever seeing one before. How he'd know what the curve of its lips meant, the gleam of tears in its eyes. Though he was very sure he'd never met this face before, it was happy to see him.

Alma had told him what his name was, what "they" called him.

Kanda sometimes tracked the beginning of his second life from that moment. Not from when he had first woken up, alone and freezing to death in the not-water which gave him not-life. He had been awake, but not alive, not a person until Alma told him he had a name.

From there, the memories rolled out like a carpet, paving the way between where he stood and the center of hell - and he could see it now, from here.

The mountains formed a protective ring around a sunken crater the size of London, and he stood at its precarious edge, facing the long drop. In the middle, rising from the smooth shadowed depths of the gargantuan hole, rose the largest tower he had seen yet by far. It was hard to look at. The pitted white surface was polished to a glare, reflecting the capricious multicoloured light of the bonfires raging around its feet. Its crown was a splintered spear of black-stained ivory. The scale of it was difficult to grasp, as it had no windows or floors that he could see - it seemed to touch the sky, bisecting the entire world between what lay to its left and what lay to its right.

The entire pit smelled of Azazel - chemical sterility, as if the fires were burning antiseptic wood.

Kanda clenched his fists and threw himself headlong off the edge of the pit. There was no sense in picking his way carefully down the sides - it would take a long time, and save him nothing. He couldn't die. All Hell could do was make him hurt, and he had been suffering a worse pain than this place could ever offer him for nine years. Maybe even longer. Kanda knew how to hurt. More importantly, he knew how to hurt and keep walking.

The sodden, steamy air of the pit swallowed him, dragged him down and hunched on his back, pushing him faster and faster toward the ground. The impact made him black out for a while. He had no way of knowing how long, but he thought it was probably only a few minutes because the bonfires had not burned down much. He still had time. Not much, but it would have to be enough.

"Alma!" he bellowed, then closed his mouth and listened hard.

It was faint, and the bonfires were terribly loud, but there - the song stopped, and he heard a voice floating down from somewhere high above. "...Yuu?"

Kanda grinned.

The tower crumbled a bit as he approached, its porous calcite walls breaking away to make a door for him. He clambered up over the pieces and went in. The interior was red. Not painted red, but made of it; red as blood, red as _marrow_. The stench was horrific.

There were no stairs. He set his hands into the tacky material of the walls and climbed them. It was like climbing the dead insides of a lightning-blasted oak. Once or twice he lost his grip and fell, but never quite to the bottom. There were stringy bits like spiderwebs hung across the interior of the tower, and though disgusting, they proved quite useful for catching himself mid-fall.

The climb took perhaps three hours. By the time he reached the prison level, exhaustion had become a meaningless word. He was a ghost of himself, hollowed out and gaunt, but he was there.

There were other prisoners there, he realized slowly. An entire complex grotto of cells, closed off by thin sheets of some sort of whitish soapy substance. Moaning souls beat their translucent fists against their doors, galvanized by the sight of potential rescue. Kanda wasn't interested in them. Somewhere in here, among the roster of the souls Azazel had decided he hated most... somewhere... but where?

"Yuu!" he heard, the voice somehow hardly any louder now than it had been at the base of the tower. "Yuu! Up here!"

His eyes searched restlessly through the ranks, and - there! Third row up, slightly to his left. He was up the wall and hacking at it with his fingernails and knees in the space of three breaths. The white stuff was resilient, but had not been designed for attack from the outside. He scraped it away like soap residue until a hole opened up. From there, it only took three good blows from his aching knee to make the whole thing give a dull shudder and break into messy chunks.

And then Alma was there in his arms.

Alma's soul didn't look like either of the Almas he had known, but someone instead like both of them at once. He had the first Alma's red lips and long hair, but the second Alma's scar and the long hair was dark, and he realized now that they had always had the same eyes. But it was unmistakably Alma. Thin, bleeding from a hundred places, bruised and shaking, but Alma.

He allowed himself ten seconds to hold on and convince himself that this was real. They were not long enough, but he could feel the floor cooling under his feet and didn't dare risk any longer. Every moment counted now. If he had climbed down the crater wall, it would already have been too late.

"We have to go," he said.

Alma nodded. "I know. I can feel it dying too. But how?"

Kanda shrugged. "No fucking idea. You got anything?"

"Not really." And then Alma grinned at him, and it was like all the best moments of those awful, torturous years under the Order's thumb, every shining second of relief of rage and agony and terror, all put together. He felt lightheaded. "But you already know what's down. So let's go up."

"Up...?" Kanda echoed. Logic said there would be nothing above the tower but sky. But this was Hell. The Afterlife. It didn't have to follow the same rules the living world did, as his body had already proved a dozen times over by remaining intact despite all the punishment Hell had put it through. "Up, huh. All right. Let's try it."

All around them, the other souls were freeing themselves from their prisons, breaking up the weakening gates of others, and milling around. Some of them had been leaders, it seemed, as the ranks quickly tightened up and began discussing strategy amongst themselves. Kanda ignored them and grasped Alma's hand. They were not his business. He had no interest in saving them. Maybe that meant he didn't deserve Heaven. He probably _did_ deserve Hell, but he wanted to be with Alma, and Alma could not be allowed to stay here. End of story.

They could see nothing above them but roof, but it was difficult to guage the distance, and the mazy red webbing obscured much of the walls. There could be a dozen doors there, for all they could see. They just needed one. The climb was downright easy now that the walls no longer burned their hands. They went up fifty feet, seventy-five, a hundred.

"This may have been a bad idea, Yuu," Alma admitted ruefully, little half-grin still firmly in place.

Kanda shook his head. "No. You were right. I... I just know."

Another twenty-five feet up. Fifty. Seventy-five.

The tower gave a great moaning crack and tilted on its base, nearly dislodging Kanda again. Alma let go with one hand and dragged him back in close to the wall. Kanda clung with his face against the gunky warm marrow and tried not to gag on the stench.

Hell was nearly dead. The center would not hold for much longer.

They climbed. They could no longer keep track of how far they had come - the grotto-prison where they had left the other prisoner souls was invisible in the crimson gloom, and there were no other markers to note their progress. Three more times, they felt the tower tremble and shift beneath them.

"Yuu," Alma said at least, distant and thin with exhaustion. "Look. Up there."

Kanda craned his stiff, knotted neck to follow Alma's shaking finger. Perhaps another forty feet above them, the walls gave way onto a different shade of darkness. Kanda recognized it: the charred sky of Hell. It was an exit. For what that was worth. The entrance he had come in through was much too far away to risk running through, with Hell falling apart around them. But he had no real hope that there would be a way out all the way up here. It was likely there would be nothing but a great view of the end of the world.

It was as good a reason to climb as any. For Alma's sake, he had to try.

The tower shook twice before they reached the dark gap, and once more as they crawled out onto the sharp edge, nearly sending them plummeting down the side and into the sullen remains of the bonfires half a mile below. They were perched on the broken edge of the hollow bone tower, feet finding purchase in its hard porous sponge. The highest edge of the broken spur loomed above them another thirty feet or so. Above that, only sky.

No exit.

They looked around without hurry, knowing already what they would see: beyond the crater, the mountains were splintering and shelving off to crash in pieces in the valleys. Their fall revealed the plains beyond, which were roiling and rent by a thousand plunging chasms. Hell was rendered impassable. They could not reach the borderlands.

Alma turned a terrible look of grief on him - not for himself, never for himself, but for Kanda who had died to come rescue him from this exact fate. Then he caught himself. "Bad deal," he said, and flashed a cheeky grin at Kanda as if this were merely another failed test which would see them locked in their rooms without supper.

It was monstrously unfair, but there was nothing to be done. They had exhausted what options they had under their own power, and there were no other powers to help them now. God was dead - at his own hand, no less - and the Devil owed him no real favours. Kanda had little doubt that Allen had expelled the angel and whatever strength it had, so he couldn't call on that. But wait... there had been another, another who owed him and Allen both.

Hope flared, wild and pure. Kanda had never had real faith in anything but Alma, and this wasn't strong enough to be called that, but it was hope. There was hope, because Allen Walker never gave up.

He had been right. The view was spectacular.

x.x.x

Allen woke up to a unfamiliar ceiling.

Its four support beams tapered from the corners of the square room to meet with a nearly seamless join in the center. They were lacquered black, and the ceiling between them was covered with thick white rice paper. Four sets of little candle-lamps burned in each corner of the room, filling it with more shadows than light. The air smelled of incense and myrrh. His head swam as if drugged. He felt like he could sleep for another dozen hours. Perhaps a whole day.

He didn't recognize the room, but Lenalee did. "Lady Anita?" she cried out, sitting up as quickly as her exhausted body would allow. "Lady Anita!"

"I'm sorry," said the dark-haired woman sitting at their feet, wringing out a green cloth over a silver dish. "It's only me."

"Hevlaska," Allen croaked, then corrected himself. "Lilith. I thought you were leaving?"

He could see her better now, his eyes adjusting to the gloom and blinking away the detritus of sleep. What he had first mistaken for a fifth set of tiny lamps were in fact her eyes, glowing over them unblinkingly as she tended their wounds. She sat with her feet neatly arranged off to the left, bare except for a pair of golden bangles on her right ankle. Had they always been there? He couldn't remember.

"I will," she said, "and I must hurry, but there is one more thing I think you will ask for my help with. I owe you a very great debt, Allen Walker. I cannot repay it, but I will stay for this, as long as I can."

For a long moment, he had no idea what she meant. His head was a vast empty space, a cloudy cavern of shadowy images he could not name. Then it began to clear and he knew. "Kanda," he said. "Kanda is in Hell, isn't he. I saw him die. Alma-"

"I cannot bring them back to life," she interrupted gently. "I do not think that's what you would have asked, but you should know, so you will not wonder. I cannot undo death."

He fell silent and waited for her to continue.

She hesitated for a moment. "It is difficult for me to know what shape the afterlife will take when it has finished collapsing," she said. "Heaven and Hell were both Azazel's constructs, and are doubtless losing their coherency as we speak. But I do not know what the wide lands between them are doing. The afterlife itself is the True God's creation, not Azazel's. They may be safe. But you should know that even if we save your friends from the ruins of Hell, we may still be consigning them to a fate little better."

Allen grinned. "Think who you're talking about, Hevlaska. You know Kanda. You know Alma even better than I do. Don't you think they'll be all right?"

Lilith looked at him, her hands forgetting their task and letting the green silk fall into the bowl. "I... yes. I think they will. Then we shall try. Give me your hand, Allen Walker, and help me find your friends."

x.x.x

The tower grumbled and tilted ten degrees away from the path Kanda had taken into the crater. Not long now. Perhaps a few minutes.

"Yuu," whispered Alma, curling his hand a little tighter around the back of Kanda's neck to hold himself in place while the floor moved dizzily under them. "Yuu, why is it that I'm not scared?"

Kanda shrugged. "Maybe because we're already dead? We've died so many times. It's not surprising that it's not scary anymore."

"Maybe," Alma replied, unsure.

They were twisted together into a little dark knot of limbs and long black hair, clinging both to each other and to the tower. Waiting for the end together. It was admittedly better than waiting for the end alone, but not by much. It wasn't enough time. Hadn't they fought hard enough? Hadn't they earned even a little bit of peace? They had. They must have. Alma at least deserved it, and if there were gods there had to be some kind of karmic justice as well, even if it was very slow. But somehow, he didn't think it would be slow this time.

Kanda knew why he wasn't afraid, but it was something he still somehow couldn't admit out loud, even to Alma. It was more than hope, now. More even than faith. Kanda was somehow certain, absolutely and unshakeably certain, that Allen was coming for them. He had no reason to believe it. None at all. And yet he could not shake the bone-deep _knowledge_ that they had not yet been abandoned here for the stones to churn to dust.

So he waited.

And Allen came.

"Kanda!" the voice bellowed from somewhere high above.

"Beansprout's voice is coming from the sky," he noted dryly, realizing only after he said it that he was echoing himself, his own words from what felt like a very long time ago. A time when Allen had done much the same thing he was doing now. Because that was what Allen did. It was who he was.

"_Kanda!_" Allen yelled again, and this time Kanda could see him, a white star rocketing down from the sky toward them.

Alma stared in amazement. "Is that your friend? The one who helped us back in America?"

"Yes," said Kanda. His smile kept trying to break his face, though he fought hard to keep it suppressed. "Yes, that's Allen."

Allen came at them headfirst, hand outstretched, legs engulfed in strangely elastic shadow. A terrible black hole gaped in his head where his left eye should have been, but the light from the rest of him seemed to shine even brighter than usual. Perhaps that was because his flesh was out of the way.

"Grab on!" he said when he was close enough to reach. "I don't have all day, come on-"

Kanda reached out and took his hand without hesitation. Alma wrapped his arms and legs around Kanda and held on with what strength he had left. Kanda had a tiny moment in which to wonder what exactly was going to happen next, and then Allen... pulled. The three of them went careening through the sky like a small dark comet. The strange shadows slingshotted them away over the ruined mountains, the disintegrating plains, far and away into the misty woodlands of the border country. Behind them, the white tower gave up at last, breaking into three pieces and sinking into its crater with a vast thunder of destruction.

Still they flew, over the woods and over a swathe of dusky golden prairies and a swampy area which smelled strongly of something sweet and floral that wasn't lotuses, until at last the shadow slackened and let them down in a broad mountain valley. Poplars and willows climbed the quiet green flanks of the sleepy monoliths, but the valley floor itself was clear but for a line of brush and maples along the riverside at its bottom. Wildflowers dotted the long fields of high grass. The sun hung overhead, in good temper.

It was beautiful. It had the same slightly out-of-focus, unreal feeling the borderland woods had had, but it was gentler here, like standing in the manifestation of a pleasant daydream.

Allen hovered slightly above them, feet still engulfed in the reaching shadows from the sky. "This is as far as we can bring you," he said with a rueful smile. "Lilith tells me there are lots of other places if you don't like this one, but you'll have to find them on your own."

"Is this Heaven?" Alma asked, wide-eyed.

"No," said Allen. "Heaven is gone. Azazel made it, just like Hell."

"Then what is it?" asked Kanda shortly. "Looks like Heaven to me."

"It's just more of the world. I don't really know how to explain it. I'm not sure I get it myself, but... the real God made the world with layers. You die in the top layer, you end up here. Lots of things are different, but it's still a kind of life. Just... longer. Less urgent. I'm sorry, I don't really have time to explain better. I think you'll figure it out on your own anyway."

"You're going back, then?"

Allen nodded. "Yeah. Somehow, I survived... thanks to you, mostly. You did all the hard work. But don't worry, and try not to miss me too much - when I die, I'll end up down here too."

"Who'd miss you?" Kanda said bluntly, but there was no force behind it, only amusement. "Live a long time, stupid beansprout, I don't want to see your dumb mug again for quite a while."

In response to that, Allen stuck out his tongue and fingered his eye. Alma laughed.

"I look forward to meeting you again," said Alma. "Thanks again for... you know, what you did."

"Don't mention it." The shadows began to contract, dragging Allen up and away. "See you later, you stupid jerk," he yelled before leaving earshot, getting the last word in just in time. He shrank to the size of the north star, shining ferociously within his little patch of shadow beside the sun, then vanished along with it.

Kanda watched him go without blinking, and knew without looking that Alma was doing the same.

And then it was just the two of them in their sunny valley, with all of eternity stretched out before them. There was no war to fight here. No Akuma. No Innocence. No Order, no scientists, no God, no Devil, no _people_. Not even a real sense of time, or at least not enough awareness of it to drive them to madness. Just the two of them and the Garden of Eden.

Alma took his hand and leaned into his shoulder. Alma. Whole, alive - inasmuch as anything here was - and standing beside him without a single other place he needed to be. Safe. Forever.

"This could be worse," Kanda admitted.

x.x.x

When Allen next opened his eyes, the world was empty of all magic but its own.

And God - the real One - saw that it was good.

**FIN**

**X.x.x.x.X**

**A/N**: Shortly after I signed up for this bigbang challenge, I was struck down by the worst writer's block I have ever experienced. I kept writing anyway, and this monster is the result. I hope you enjoyed the trip. Thank you for reading.


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